McShep Match Team War 2009 Interview with justbreath80
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | McShep Match Team War 2009 Interview with justbreath80 |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | justbreath80 |
| Date(s): | August 20, 2009 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Stargate Atlantis |
| External Links: | McShep Match: Team War, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
justbreath80 was interviewed in 2009 for McShep Match.
It is part of this series: McShep Match Interview Series.
Excerpts
How long have you been writing fan fiction and/or making fan art and/or whatever else (vids, knitted goods, pornographic gingerbread cookies)?
I have been involved in fandom since the fall of 2005, when I somehow managed to discover that fan fiction existed, and then promptly became obsessed with due South. Funnily enough, I never really saw myself as a writer, even though I loved to write when I was younger. I proved myself wrong in April of 2006, when I wrote my first fic.
I was heavily into due South and assorted C6D fandoms (Hard Core Logo, RPS, ReGenesis) at first, but am mostly out of that now. SGA is my main writing fandom at this point, but these days I read SPN RPS (I can’t believe I just admitted that in a public forum) Star Trek reboot, and Merlin. I also used to read some SG-1.
Why do you ship McKay/Sheppard? What draws you to the pairing, what do you like and dislike? Favourite scenes or episodes? Quotes? Screencaps? What other SGA pairings do you ship?
To be honest, while most of what I’ve written in SGA is John/Rodney, I tend to lean toward the John/Ronon side of things. I just see that pairing more obviously in canon. What I like about John and Rodney, though, is the way that the characters have the potential to play off of one another, regardless of what we are given in canon. I think that they have the ability to push each other and make each other better, and there’s so much you can do with that as a writer.
So, I think of you as writing dueSouth meltingly hot porn stories (I was just working my way through your Ray/Ray stories last week), and you also write a lot about Ronon (which of course makes me think that Fraser/Ronon would be fascinating, but *neither here nor there*)... what did you learn in dueSouth that you are carrying over into how you write in SGA, and what's new, what doesn't work? What POVs do you find easiest to write, and why do you think that is?
Hmm. Well, in many ways, I see parallels between John and Fraser and Ronon, and Rodney and Ray Kowalski and Ray Vecchio (pre-Vegas, anyway, he shifts for me after). When I first started writing in SGA I had to be really conscious not to turn them into the same characters. I mean, Rodney has some elements that are Fraser-esque, but he’s NOT Fraser in about a thousand other ways. And Ray Kowalski is not Rodney, his relationship to Stella being this huge thing in his life that Rodney lacks. But John and Fraser share their black marks, their exile. Ronon and Fraser share the fish-out-of-water experience. You get the point. They are similar personalities and I think I’m drawn to them for that reason.
I think that Rodney and Ray POVs are somewhat easier in general, because they wear a lot more of their emotions on their sleeves and seem more transparent. As a result, I truly LOVE writing from POVs that are more challenging, where you have to dive deeper in to the character and into their twisted little heads to get at who they are. John and Ronon and Fraser do that for me. One thing that was a big shift was moving from a crime-based fandom to a scifi one, and having to wrap my head around those new elements. I think my solution has generally been to, um, not pay much attention to plot. Hee. It’s not that I’m not trying to tell a story, but pretty much everything I write is some kind of character study. I find that everything we DON’T know about characters like John Sheppard or Ronon Dex or Benton Fraser (who tells lots of stories but doesn’t say a whole lot) or even post-Vegas Vecchio is where the real meat is, for me as a writer.
I’m glad you think of me as a porn writer! I used to do a LOT of that, but haven’t written a truly dirty sex scene in a while. It’s a shame, really.