PlaceToHide.net Interview with Ali

Interviews by Fans
Title:	PlaceToHide.net Interview with Ali
Interviewer:	Bethany
Interviewee:	Ali
Date(s):	September 1, 2012
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Hanson
External Links:	September 2012 Author: Ali – Spotlights, Archived version
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In 2012, Ali was interviewed by Bethany for the spotlights section of her website PlaceToHide.net.

See others in the series at PlaceToHide.net Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

Technically, I have been writing for about 15 years. I started writing Hanfic back in the late 90’s, but I stopped between 2000-2007. I was on an unintentional “break” from Hanson during that time. They kind of disappeared, and I was busy getting married and moving to another continent, so I wasn’t online every day searching for info on what they were up to and I lost track of them. But after Isaac’s blood clot scare in ’07, I got back into them hardcore. I started reading Hanfic again after I came across a picture on photobucket. It was a Zaylor collage, and someone had written on it “sometimes I feel bad for reading/writing Zaylor… then I remember that they bring it on themselves.” lol I had NO clue what Zaylor or Hancest was, so I looked it up and found the definition in urban dictionary. That led me to chockablock’s story, “As Long As I Come Home To You”. After reading that, I went from being squicked out over Zaylor to being obsessed. I started getting story ideas, and I just felt like I needed to write them down.

I wouldn’t say I’m an Adam fan. haha I’m a Tommy Joe Ratliff fan. 😉 But I do dabble a little in the Adam fandom because of that. I think the fandoms are very similar in a lot of ways. The fans are all VERY passionate, a lot of them are very friendly, and a portion of them are batshit cray. I think the main difference I’ve noticed in the Adam fandom (and honestly, it might be more of a difference between LJ and AO3 more than the fandoms), is that the fiction readers in that community are WAY more into the stories they read. They get very excited about them and they tend to leave more in-depth feedback for the authors. It could be because that fandom is still relatively new and they’re all still more passionate about it, whereas Hanson fans are more “over it”. I don’t know, it just feels different.

I’m honestly more of a writer than a reader. For some reason I’ve always found it VERY hard to make myself sit down and focus on reading anything, no matter what it is, so my reading experience in the Hanfic community is limited. But I will say that I love the worlds that chockablock creates, and the thought and detail she puts into her stories.

There are stories that are very special to me that I’m not “proud” of. Not because I dislike them, but because I don’t feel they’re necessarily my best work. But because those stories brought me closer to people I love, they’ll always be my favorites. Stories like “The Fallout”, and all of the Jammy/Taylor fics. But the ones I’m actually proud of… it always seems to come back to “What If”, “Paint it Black”, and “Either Side”, for me. I’m proud of how many people I seemed to touch with “Life Less Ordinary”, but somewhere along the line that fic became more of a chore to write, and I’m still waiting to rediscover my passion for it so that I can finally finish writing it.