Lois & Clark Nfic Archive Interview with LabRat

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Lois & Clark Nfic Archive Interview with LabRat
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	LabRat ("Doc. Klein's LabRat. LabRat for short. Or LB or even Labby, depending on who you're talking to. The capitalized 'R' is purely pretentious, but hey it looks good on screen.")
Date(s):	1998 or 1999
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
External Links:	full interview is here, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

In 1998 or 1999, LabRat was interviewed for Lois & Clark Nfic Archive.

For a later interview with LabRat, see Lois & Clark Nfic Archive Interview: Where Are They Now? -- LabRat.

For other interviews in this series, see Category:Lois and Clark Fan Interviews.

Some Excerpts

Sadly to say, I was never a fan of Superman. I can recall reading a couple of Wonder Woman comics when I was a kid, but generally the comic genre never attracted me. I did love the Chris Reeves/Margot Kidder movies and thought they were definitive portrayals - until I encountered L&C. Since falling head over heels for L&C I have picked up a couple of Superman comic compilations and have found them interesting in the main. But it's very much the relationship between Clark and Lois with Superman as a diversion or a catalyst to problems which they must overcome which attracts me to LNC, rather than the superhero myth alone. If LNC had been just another Adventures of Superman clone, then it wouldn't have sustained my interest for very long. It was the dilemma of how Clark tries to cope with having a private life that is in conflict with his desire to use his superpowers to help the world that interested me. I guess I'm a Shipper FoLC - to coin a phrase! <g> And a sucker for a good romance.

I think I was writing before I left the womb. It seems, looking into the distant past, that I was always hoarding scraps of paper with some scrawl or another on it. I battered at an old Petite typewriter for years before graduating to an adult version and then onto PCs and finally the ultimate writers' tool - the net. I guess I began to take it seriously when I was sixteen though. That puts me at over 20 years of writing by this point. At first it was general stuff. I flirted with poetry for a time, but it was too restricting. I love to wallow, wade in the detail. Then, I (belatedly yet again and years after everyone else had discovered it as a good thing - do you detect a pattern here?) found a compilation of Star Trek fanfic (Sondra Marshak's and Myrna Culbreath's New Voyages) in my bookstore and fell in love with both the show and the concept. I had had no idea that fans actually took what was on screen and explored the hidden facets the restrictions of TV missed. This was an epiphany. I started writing my own Trek fanfic, even had some published in the zines. Gradually, through the years, as I've moved on from show to show, I've taken my love of asking 'what if' with me. I think I always will. There's so much to explore.

Well, as I say - I was overtaken by nfic. This was actually very strange, because I'd never considered writing anything but PG fanfic before. In fact, I'd had something of an angst block on writing anything else! I'd often bemoaned the fact that I seemed genetically incapable of getting my characters to move below the left shoulder whenever they found themselves in a clinch. And heaven forbid that they should try gravitating to a portion of delicate anatomy. That was enough to bring me out in a hot flush and make me come over all funny. Nope, in my fanfic, trains always roared through tunnels and waves crashed delicately on beaches whenever things got hot and steamy. Then, I discovered L&C nfic that other authors had written and fell in love. Somehow, Lois and Clark seemed especially easy to write for that way. Not long after, I challenged myself to see if I could do something similar when a fanfic idea that was only ever going to work as nfic popped into my head almost in its entirety. The result was my first posted nfic, INSIDE SCOOP. And I just haven't stopped since.