Immeritus Interview with Shaggydogstail

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Immeritus Interview with Shaggydogstail
Interviewer:	Pen and Moon
Interviewee:	Shaggydogstail
Date(s):	September 2006
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Harry Potter
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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In 2006, Shaggydogstail was interviewed for Immeritus by Pen and Moon.

Others in the Series

See Immeritus Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

Around about October 2004. I was looking for an on-line Sorting Hat game I'd heard mentioned on a TV programme when I stumbled across CoS forums. There were any number of discussion threads that I was dying to have my say on, so I registered straight away. I was hooked in no time! It took me a few more months to discover fanfiction and art as, though they do feature on CoS, it's mostly a discussion forum. I only really got hooked on fanfic when I found FictionAlley, as up until then an awful lot of what I'd read on sites like FF.Net had been of dubious quality, to put it mildly.

Nothing is taboo in HP fandom, absolutely nothing. It's a real free-for-all.

There's a number of things that I personally don't care to write about. I'd never write anything that I consider to be abusive, so non-con, parent-child incest, and sexual relationships between teachers and students are all out. (Though I do love a spot of schoolboy flirting with McGonagall!) There's quite a few pairings that I refuse to write because I just don't like them.

I don't censor my work as such, but I do sometimes write to order. If I'm writing something for a fic-exchange or as a gift for a friend I'm very conscious that it should be something they want to read, so I won't add in elements that I think will annoy or squick them. That would just be rude.

There is a lot of m/m slash in the HP fandom, but because this fandom is so huge it really isn't difficult to find a lot of good het, femmeslash and gen fic as well. I've never felt under any pressure to write slash as opposed to other genres and writing other genres hasn't done me any harm—one of my most popular stories was gen and I've got good feedback for het as well. I'm afraid I have very little patience for the whole 'why women write slash' debate, because it tends to produce the most dreadful cod-psychological witterings. I just write what I like, and most of the other authors I know do the same.

My husband and my best friend know about my fandom life and that's it. I'd never tell most of the people I know about my fandom activities because they'd think I was a complete freak. Given that I write gay porn about characters in children's books, I think they'd have a point. It looks pretty weird to outsiders.