The Best of Trek Fanfic Interview with Killa

Interviews by Fans
Title:	The Best of Trek Fanfic Interview with Killa
Interviewer:	The Best of Trek Fanfic
Interviewee:	Killa
Date(s):	February 2002
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Star Trek: TOS
External Links:	An Interview with Killa; reference link
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The Best of Trek Fanfic Interview with Killa was conducted in 2002.

It is part of a series of nineteen interviews, see The Best of Trek Fanfic.

Excerpts

[How long have you been writing fanfic and how did you get started?]: I first found out that Star Trek fandom and fanfiction were still around in 1994, when I stumbled across the Star Trek message boards on AOL. I was immediately hooked on the idea and trolled the newsgroups looking for any original series fanfic I could find. There wasn't a whole lot, and it wasn't long before I started typing away on my own story in every spare moment. Next thing I knew, I had two story files going on my hard drive. What I really wanted was to read some K/S stories, or at least meet someone I could talk to about the idea. Finally, I got brave, or maybe desperate, and decided to try posting chapters of a story online to try and find some other K/S fans.

[You write a lot of K/S fanfic. What drew you to this pairing and what do you enjoy writing about it?]: I don't think anyone ever asked me that before. It's funny, I read a lot of genfic, and a good amount of het adult fic, especially if it has Kirk in it. But the themes I want to write about seem to fit very well with my general affinity for slash fanfiction, and with Kirk and Spock in particular. I like to write about the inevitability of loss, and the fear of rejection and self-revelation that bars us from intimacy with one another. I think these two conflicting forces have been very important in my own life, and so I identified very strongly with Spock as someone who guards against intimacy and self-revelation, and empathized with his warring impulses against emotion and towards connection with his human shipmates, and Kirk in particular.

Watching the series, and especially the movies, I saw a profound intimacy between Kirk and Spock, the kind that leads people to say things like, "You are closer to the captain than anyone in the universe," or "You? At his side -- as if you've always been there and always will be." Again and again we were shown how deep the connection between those two characters went, and yet, because of their chosen paths as a Vulcan, as a captain, as an officer, the times when it was okay to express that connection aloud were rare and fleeting. Still, the profound understanding and trust between them seemed, to me, dramatically more meaningful and lasting than any other relationship either man had with another character. In my empathy for the characters and the risks they were taking to allow themselves to care for one another so deeply in the face of danger and their own fears of intimacy, I found that I wanted very much for them to be allowed to make a more lasting connection, to find comfort and acceptance in a profound way.

I have read a few (very few) stories where this connection happens without taking the last step into a physical relationship, but the sexuality of K/S allows it to happen in a real, physical way that I find very satisfying. ;-) We are never more revealed or vulnerable than we are during sex, so the rewards of intimacy and acceptance are greater.

[Tell us a little about "Bitter Glass." We found that story to be an intensely compelling portrait of Spock and your attention to detail, ie using Vulcan and Romulan phrases throughout, added dimension to the story. What sparked the idea for that story?]: Thank you very much. :) Beth M. and I got into an email conversation several years back about Spock's off-screen love life. We talked a lot about the kind of woman he would choose for himself if he were to get married, and how it would affect his relationship with Kirk. At some point, the conversation wandered off on a tangent about the flaws we both saw in the later Trek movies, especially in Star Trek 6 and 7 and in Unification, and how we wished we could "fix" the characterization and canon problems we saw in those movies and episodes. I started writing Bitter Glass around the same time she started writing Last Dance, as I recall, and we were comparing notes a lot and writing about some of the same ideas in very different ways. I put some of those ideas together with the great portrayal of Saavik that Carolyn Clowes and Vonda McIntyre gave us in their Trek novels, and the story quickly grew a mind of its own.

Thank you very much for including me in your site, and thanks to whoever nominated me -- I was really touched. Sometimes I think internet fandom is a bit too intense, and that we really weren't meant to spend so much time engaging in intimate dialog with people we've never met before. Sometimes list culture can become very harsh, and I get the feeling that there's a kind of road rage going on, that people feel it's okay to spread negativity around at will because they're anonymous, and they can just move on to a new forum (or fandom) if things get too unpleasant. Being mentioned on your site and in such good company was a really nice reminder of how thoughtful fans can be sometimes, and I needed that. Keep it up!