Octaves of the Heart Interview with seraC

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Octaves of the Heart Interview with seraC
Interviewer:	Octaves of the Heart
Interviewee:	seraC
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 seraC is posted at the Buffy website Octaves.

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

Excerpts

I guess the best place to begin is at the beginning. I began writing fic maybe about a year ago. It started off innocently enough. I was sitting on my bedroom floor with a cup of coffee and started thinking about Kyle from the show Roswell (this was maybe the beginning of the third season) and everything he had been through. I was also randomly thinking about the way the WB had changed its primary demographics from an African American audience to a Caucasian audience and I was holding a cup of coffee and I thought about the potential for those obscure sort of one-off characters you get sometimes on shows and WHAM! My first fic was born. The birth was followed shortly by my first Buffy fic, which happened to be an original character based on one of my wallpapers, called Escaping Twilight. It’s been an alternately excruciating and just plain painful process since then. I write whatever happens to pop into my head, typically AU future fic. I find there is more leeway and I’m not likely to be “jossed” before I can get the fic posted. I also tend to write darker pieces and that works better, for me, when placed in the future after everything is said and done because while the show continues, in present time, there is still hope. I don’t deal too often in hope. (With the exception of Istanbul and that may be why people like it.)

I avoided fan fiction for a very long time because finding good fanfic can be a rather painful process. My first real run-in was sheer accident. I fell in love with the show Farscape and went hunting for info and came across Maayan’s site Only Human which lead me to her fic No Dominion, which isn‘t even her best, but which was good enough to show me that excellent fan fic was possible. I don’t read stuff that’s pure wish fulfillment or that fans are writing for the sake of pairing up their favorite characters. I read what is true to the story and true to the characterization. It’s got to fit with what we know and if it doesn’t then the author has to build in a sense of what the progression was to lead the characters to the place where they are now. In a sense that is what That Which Survives is all about. What could possibly lead Xander and Dawn together and is it a good thing.