Octaves of the Heart Interview with Femmenerd

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Octaves of the Heart Interview with Femmenerd
Interviewer:	Octaves of the Heart
Interviewee:	Femmenerd
Date(s):	early 2000s
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Buffyverse
External Links:	online here, Archived version
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Octaves of the Heart Interview with Femmenerd is posted at the Buffy website Octaves.

For others in this series, see Octaves of the Heart Interview Series.

Excerpts

I write fanfic because…I love these characters. In many respects I believe that all of my fics are love letters of a sort both to these fictional people/worlds and also to other fans. I write fic when I can’t get enough, when I want to be intimate with certain characters—their motivations, passions, contradictions—and when I hear them “talking in my head” (in a totally non-schizophrenic way, really). So naturally most of my fic is character-driven more than it is long and plotty, although that may also have something to do with the fact that I’ve been quite distracted with getting myself into graduate school during the (brief) time that I’ve been writing BtVS/Ats fic.

I first fell in love with BtVS…when I happened to catch “The Gift” when it re-aired just before the beginning of Season 6. I never missed an episode after that. I was immediately seduced by both the lure of a young woman as heroic figure as well as the humor, intelligence, dense web of pop culture references, interlocking relationships of all kinds, and um, pretty vampires of course. It didn’t take long before I’d devoured all of the earlier seasons on DVD and in syndication. This was also at the same time that I began pursuing television studies in college and ended up using BtVS as my case study, eventually writing at least 4 or 5 academic essays referencing the show. And geek that I am, I first learned about fan fiction from reading scholarly work. My inner fangirl immediately pricked up her ears—I think I was a born fangirl but I’d just never had anyone else to play with before (I had an “Wizard of Oz” themed ensemble when I was four years old including bonnet and apron and used to write “Anne of Green Gables” FitBs in my head when I wasn’t watching Star Trek: Next Gen as a young teen). Weirdly though, I started out writing fic in other fandoms before I came to Jossverse fandom—I think I feared that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to something I loved that passionately. But now, though I’ve written fic in 6 fandoms to date (Roswell, Joan of Arcadia, Veronica Mars, and the L Word in addition to BtVS/AtS and Firefly for those of you who are curious about the strange maneuverings of my obsessive nature), it is still Jossverse that most hits me where I live.