How Will It End? Interview with Syntax6

Interviews by Fans
Title:	How Will It End? Interview with Syntax6
Interviewer:	How Will It End?
Interviewee:	Syntax6
Date(s):	2002?
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	X-Files
External Links:	full interview is here, Archived version
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Syntax6 was interviewed for the X-Files website How Will It End?.

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

Some Excerpts

I found XF fanfic in January 2000, and started writing it in April of the same year. I stumbled across the XF fandom while writing fanfic for another show. While I'd been writing fanfic since I was 13, this was the first time I'd considered posting it for mass consumption, and I needed examples of how to format, what sort of copyright disclaimer to use, etc. The webmistress in this other tiny fandom had helpfully included links to the large XF sites to guide us, so I started poking around. At this point, I'd only seen a small handful of XF episodes, and the movie, so my canon-based knowledge was pitiful. But the stories were fabulous! I was impressed with the overall high quality of the writing, and the breadth of the XF community. I read voraciously for months, devouring about 300K of XF fic a night. After four months, I was ready to try my hand. I had by this time added perhaps another two dozen XF episodes to my mental library -- still a paltry quantity -- so my initial characterization was very much an amalgam of other people's interpretations from their fanfic stories. It took me until "Blood Oranges" really, before I was writing my own versions.

I don't think the end of the series or lack of a second movie (thus far) has affected my writing at all. My XF world ends with "Je Souhaite," so my fanfic writing career only overlapped with the series for about eighteen months. To be clear: I harbor zero ill-will toward Chris Carter or 1013 or even FOX for the way the series turned out. I liked Reyes and Doggett, and I enjoyed some of the episodes from seasons eight and nine. But I signed on for a Mulder-Scully crime-solving team, and that's what continues to interest me most.

Oh, I would be a terrible person to write the next movie. As I mentioned, I'd just want to roll time back to 1999-ish, with no baby, no Mulder-returned-from-the-dead, and no 574 kinds of aliens. I wouldn't even know where to begin writing a movie that picks up after "The Truth" and I've always found the mythology rather murky. In my hands, the movie would probably end up being a monster-of-the-week type thing that was heavy on the human element, light on the paranormal.

The major switch [in pseuds] was from Hannah Mason (also not my real name, btw) to syntax6. I did that because a woman in my academic department found out about my Hannah name from a friend of a friend and was trying to make trouble for me. Since then, I've done a few one-offs under other names, usually because I don't want the syntax6 expectations weighing on the story. People can get awfully snippy with me if they are expecting one type of fic and I've written another. Even with the most recent birthday series I wrote, some of the letters I got were people gently rapping my knuckles: enough with these short pieces -- where was another casefile? Sometimes I just don't want to have to deal with people's expectations of syntax6. I'd prefer that the stories stand on their own. I don't think I had enough of a readership as Hannah Mason that the switch affected anything in that regard. My non-syn stories do not get the number of hits or the amount of feedback that my syntax6 stories do.