How Will It End? Interview with Deslea Judd

Interviews by Fans
Title:	How Will It End? Interview with Deslea Judd
Interviewer:	How Will It End?
Interviewee:	Deslea Judd
Date(s):	2003?
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	X-Files
External Links:	full interview is here, Archived version
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Deslea Judd was interviewed for the X-Files website How Will It End?.

It is part of a series. See How Will It End? Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

I started writing X Files fanfic in 1996, when Piper Maru/Apocrypha aired in my country. At that time, I was not online and didn't know what fanfic was or that others wrote it. I only knew that I had written it about various television shows as a child and teenager, but that had given way to the pressures of work and study in my teens.

That changed after Piper Maru/Apocrypha. That double was my favourite episode for a long time, and it left me full of questions about open story threads. To be perfectly honest with you, I can't even remember what all those threads were now, but they consumed my attention at the time. I do remember that one of them was what appeared to me to be clear Scully/Skinner UST. Given the show's insistence at that time on avoiding romance, I figured that this would only be included because it fed into a greater story. As we now know, that wasn't the case. But the theory I came up with was a Scully/Skinner sci-fi story grounded in the radiation-related capabilities of the alien race demonstrated in the episode, the eugenics leanings hinted at in Colony and Paper Clip, and a few twists and turns related to Scully's abduction. It was just a protracted effort at dealing with the loose ends in my mind, as I had done with other episodes as well, but this one ate away at my brain. So I wrote it out, all fifty thousand words of it, mostly just to purge it from my mind. It's called Offspring, and it's not a bad story, although it has a few newbie mistakes - adverb abuse is probably the worst flaw, along with an unnecessary subplot. But I did my research about the scientific side, and I think it holds up as a reasonably good sci-fi/mythology work for its time. It's not in the league of my stories today, but I was proud of it back then.

Roll on a few months, and I won some internet access in a competition. I searched USENET for XF-related newsgroups, and I came across alt.tv.x-files.creative. I looked at a few posts, and thought, hey, I know what this is! That was how I found out that what I did had a name, and readers, and a structure for sharing it. So I posted the story I'd written, and it all went from there.

Alternative philes are very resilient - we've had to be, in order to stick with the show for characters and arcs that only got a few episodes per season. We were never really reliant on the week-to-week fix of the show. So the impact of the end of the show was far less among us than it was among fans of the leads. We did lose a few authors, sadly, but far fewer than were lost from MSR and DRR. For myself, I don't really find the end of the show problematic in terms of inspiration and source material - there are more mythology threads than I could pursue in a lifetime. I have over a dozen stories I want to write now, and it frustrates me that I can't get them down fast enough. I'm writing now much as I did back then - I look at an arc, and I turn it over in my head from the point of view of this character or that one, and try to work out what they make of it and where that might lead them.

Definitions will always typecast us to a certain extent, even when they're true. It's true I'm a non-MSR writer, but unfortunately that description carries inferences in some peoples' view about what I think and what agenda I have in writing, and those inferences are not always correct. I get the distinct impression that a few people believe I write the various antagonists' POV as a mouthpiece for my own POV on Mulder and Scully, and that isn't the case. Mulder and Scully's perspective seems incomplete and

unsatisfying to me, and for that reason it doesn't interest me, certainly not enough to write about it. Many if not most of my stories do not mention them at all. Nor is it really about objective right and wrong, although I admit that my sympathies fall more with the antagonists. In truth, I think they're *all* wrong, in varying degrees, but the antagonists and their more developed ideology are much more interesting to me, given my background.

Another definition that people use about me is that I'm a Krycek/Marita writer. This is an identity with which I have a love-hate relationship. I love that pairing, and it's a very personal one to me, at least in a philosophical sense. But Krycek/Marita - while a major interest - still makes up less than half my work. I've written everything from Mulder/Diana to Krycek/Diana to Jeffrey/Samantha to Yves/Jimmy to Doggett/Reyes to Knowle/Shannon. Anytime people call me an [insert pairing here] writer, I feel that they've missed the point. I don't write about pairings. I write about journeys. Many of those journeys take place in partnership, but the point isn't the partnership. The point is why they formed that partnership, and what they do with it once they have it.

That said, I can't say that my various reputations have particularly curtailed my freedom. At worst, they've deterred a few people from reading my work, and that's unfortunate, but it doesn't affect what or how I choose to write. And I've attracted more readers than I've lost. I'm fortunate to have reached a level of profile where many people will give my work a chance even when the subject matter is not what they would normally choose to read. The Concessions series, which dealt with consensual sibling incest, is a case in point. That's given me a certain liberty to take chances without losing my audience at the headers, in a way that many authors don't.

I'm spearheading a virtual series called X Files: VCU (http://xfvcu.deslea.com). XFVCU is set eighteen months after The Truth, and it reunites Mulder, Scully, Doggett, Reyes, Krycek, Fowley, Spender, and Follmer as a team, and they're not playing very happily together, I can tell you! The basic premise is that what we saw onscreen was the surface layer of a deep cover operation to fight the conspiracy. Now, it's all come out, and the various fugitives and so-called corpses have emerged from witness protection to handle the fallout. The character conflicts we're used to are still there, but in some cases they have different situational origins. The idea is to explore these characters and their dynamics as a group on the job. I'm responsible for continuity and the mythology, and I've just finished writing about fifty pages of support documentation for the casefile writers. We wanted to develop a true ensemble where every character's idiosyncrasies came into play, with a coherent backstory to support it, and that meant getting to know them all over again in the light of this modified context. It's been a huge job. I'm also writing the pilot episode, Midnight In The Firing Line - that's the most pressing thing right now - plus two more mythology doubles. The pilot is very demanding because not only does it need to hold up as a casefile, it also has to introduce this new context and how the characters interact and why, without swamping the reader. It's a huge challenge.