The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Khaki
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Khaki |
| Interviewer: | The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive |
| Interviewee: | Khaki |
| Date(s): | May 16, 2003 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | X-Men |
| External Links: | interview is here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Khaki was conducted in 2003.
Other Interviews in the Series
See The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview Series.
Some Excerpts
Answer: Me? Uh, ok. I am a 29-year-old single woman living in Salt Lake City, Utah, an old maid by community standards. I even have the requisite cat. By the age of 70, I hope to have a broken-down house and at least several dozen cats that will eventually turn on me when the food runs out.In regards to more fannish pursuits, I'm a second-generation science fiction fan, benefiting from my parents' collection of books and movies. Science fact interests me just as much, though. As a kid, I had a microscope and a chemistry set, not to mention access to the family's computers. We had a Radio Shack TRS 80 back in the early '80's. It had no internal memory and ran programs on cassette tapes that looked exactly like music cassettes, but I could do ASCII art and play games on it. Everything's so much easier now with my 50+ Gb computer.
I also enjoy all things related to medicine. I find the human body fascinating, both in how vulnerable and how resilient it can be. I never gave much thought to going into medicine as an occupation, though. Despite my interest on an intellectual level, in real life I'm a wimp when it comes to blood and suffering.
I've made up fan stories since I was a kid, but I never wrote any of them down. They were just a way to entertain myself at night as I waited to fall asleep, and of course, they always wrote me into the universe. Mary Sue, anyone?When I saw the X-Men movie on opening night, I had an immediate need to know more about the characters, especially Wolverine. Searching for X-Men books resulted in a lot of disappointment, though. I'd expected Marvel to make the most of the movie's hype and publish novels, but the movie's novelization was based on an old script and no new novels followed it. I did buy the Essential Wolverines and several comics covering the more interesting Wolverine stories, but fan fiction seemed to fit my interests the best.
I became a member of the xmenmoviefanfic and wolverineandrogue egroups almost immediately after they started. I discovered wolverineandjubilee.com, fanfiction.net and other, smaller fan fiction archives shortly thereafter. Despite the fact I'd joined these lists and become a regular visitor to several fan fiction sites, though, I lurked for months. Yep, I'm that shy even in cyberspace.
It took about four months before I ever delurked and wrote anything, and even then I only started a round robin on wolverineandjubilee.com. I didn't solo-author a story until three more months had passed. It took me that long to gain confidence in myself as a writer and to come up with a story idea that couldn't be satisfactorily written as a round robin.
The main reason I overcame my shyness and posted is that no one would write the story I wanted to read. I wanted to know what happened to Logan at Alkali Lake and what he found out about his past, the more action the better. The majority of the stories at the time focused on his return to the mansion and his relationship with Rogue, only mentioning Alkali Lake in passing.
That's the best thing about writing stories; the focus is on things that interest me, like action and medical drama, and off of things that don't, like soap-operaish love triangles. Also, because fandom builds on itself, my stories can affect other authors and influence the types of stories they write. It's a win-win situation.
I really love the power writing gives me to manipulate reader's emotions, too. It can be sadistic how much I love a good cliffhanger.
At first, writing round robins was very helpful. Since I was only one of several authors, I wasn't soley responsible for the quality of the story. Aldo, the idea that people found a pice of my writing so interesting that they wanted to contribute to it helped boost my confidence. It only became frustrating a little later, when I knew enough about the characters to feel comfortable writing about them on my own.You see, when writing a round robin story, no one should have an idea of how it's going to end until the story begins to wind down. If one or more of the writers have a direction they want the story to go, they'll most likely be disappointed. This lack of direction is helpful if the originator of the round robin doesn't have any idea where to take the story and hopes that other fans might. However, it can result in a rambling story that goes too long or remains a permanent work in process. Therefore, the person who starts a round robin is responsible for continuing to contribute throughout the course of the story not necessarily to control its direction, but to keep the plot moving and to point the story towards a conclusion when the time comes.
While writing round robins, I learned that the best way to keep other authors participating is to always end my part with a cliffhanger. It compels those people following the story to add simply to get some sort of resolution to whatever problem I'd left the characters confronting.