The Writer's Block Interview with MustangSally
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Writer's Block Interview with MustangSally |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | MustangSally |
| Date(s): | 2001? (The interview uses the phrase "throughout the '90s" and "Serious Moonlight" was written before 2002) |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | focus on The X-Files and Buffy |
| External Links: | The Writer's Block Interview with MustangSally, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
MustangSally was interviewed in 2001 or 2002.
Some Topics Disussed
- The X-Files
- Iolokus Series
- Joseph Campbell
- the author's start in writing, and field hockey
- acafandom
Excerpts
If you had to choose a piece of your online work, which do you feel is most representative of what you’d like to accomplish with your writing? (if you could explain why, that would be great.):
I’m not going to say Iolokus because that will be covered later. At this very moment I’m just delighted with the BtVS fic "Serious Moonlight". It’s a hardcore genre piece – Buffy Meets Indiana Jones, and I just love it to death. Rivka and I tried to find every cliché of the action/adventure movie and come up with a rip-snorting plot for support. Car chases, horses, a formal dance, mummies, a burning warehouse, and there’s even a great across-the rooftops chase sequence in Luxor which ends up with a fruit cart getting overturned. You have to have the fruit cart.
God, that one’s fun. I swear I can hear the Raiders March in the background when I read it.
What started your writing partnership with Rivka? What was you two’s process for composing the stories?:
I feel like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men: The Truth? You can’t handle the truth!
Seriously, I remember watching the episode, where Scully sees that her ova are being used by the Consortium to make mutant babies (I’m terrible with titles) and being profoundly pissed. Carter really missed the boat on some elements of the female psyche in a big way. I started thinking about how I would feel if I’d been Scully and that spun out into a plot line where she takes back her power over her choice to reproduce, a very political statement, really. I’d read Rivka’s stuff and found it deliciously dark and edgy and we’d corresponded a bit, so I sent her my plot outline and asked her if she was interested in collaborating. The rest, as they say, is history.
Methodology-wise, I’d generally work up a plot skeleton, send it to her and she’d add, move, change whatever she wanted. After a couple of passes, the skeleton was pretty sound and then we’d just start writing whatever scenes caught our fancy. There wasn’t any of the "you write Mulder, I’ll write Scully" division and we’d often overwrite and edit the shit out of each other’s scenes. There was no ego involved as far as "these are my words, thou shall not touch"! In the end, the only weakness was the fact that Mulder and Scully have similar voices, but we just decided that was acceptable. There was a nice disorienting factor where you weren’t initially sure which one was narrating a scene. They would think alike, since they had a similar vocabulary and educational background, and had been partners long enough that they’d taken on each other’s mannerisms of thought – the way "old marrieds" do.
"The X-Files" was, itself, a mythological text for the culture throughout the 90’s. If you extend [Joseph] Campbell’s definition into the virtual world... the Internet has become a culture, and X-Files fandom one within it. If I might be so bold, considering the polarization that "Iolokus" consistently brings when it’s discussed in a public forum (along with the familiarity-bordering-on-common-knowledge place it holds in the fandom), I would say that "Iolokus" is one of the core Myths of X-Files fanfiction.
Can you see this definition in this piece? (and incidentally, I’m asking a critical question, so you are free to take my definition and operate from that – I’m the one saying it, not you, so you can take off from what I’ve said and not worry about owning the definitions or classifications yourself.) If not, how do explain the appeal – even for the ones who love to talk about how it does NOT work for them – of "Iolokus"?
The frightening thing about this question is how blindingly accurate it is.
Iolokus deliberately started out as a retelling of the Medea myth. I’m heavily into Jung and Campbell, and saw Scully as turning into this Medea/Kali figure who would destroy her children rather than give up control of them. At the same time, Rivka and I made a deliberate attempt to take the conventions of X-Files fanfic and turn them on their ass. At that point there were a lot of "first time" stories, so we had Mulder and Scully begin their sexual relationship before the story began, we concentrated on their alienation from others and from each other. We reversed the gender roles even more than they had been on the show with a highly masculinized Scully, and a rather effeminate Mulder. If you notice, Scully initiates all the violence, and Mulder initiates any attempt at emotional connection. It’s no wonder that in the first action scene she crawls through an air duct (vagina) with a rifle (penis) to shoot (penetrate) Bill who has taken the children hostage while Mulder tries to negotiate (nurture).
Lather, rinse, repeat.
In the matter of the various Mulder clones, we were playing with the meta idea that every writer has a different vision of Mulder – gay Mulder, homicidal maniac Mulder, tough Mulder, whore Mulder, and crazy Mulder. Hence the clones.
What do you think of the idea that "Iolokus" could be an Anti-Myth, a text meant to move AGAINST what we feel is the desired interpretation of these characters?:
I think I just answered that.
But we had such a good time finding and pushing people’s buttons. We tried to disturb, tried to show the characters as being really, really, really damaged people. Both Rivka and I took a very juvenile pleasure in rattling cages with that. Malicious mischief, really.
You’ve moved into BtVS with your online writing. Are they any other fandoms you’re associated with in terms of your writing? What about those shows engages you? Are they the same aspects as the ones that engaged you about XF?:
Well I’m a sucker for strong woman/weak man. And that pretty much sums up the whole Buffy/Spike thing. Also the perversion of the "forbidden relationship". Besides, Duchovny and Marsters are just eminently fuckable and I’m shallow as hell. If I can’t have sex with them, I’m going to make the female lead do it!
I wrote a lot of fic when I was an adolescent, and none of it will ever see the light of day online. Some fic just needs to stay in spiral notebooks, and one of the problems with the online fic community is that not everybody knows what’s webworthy and what’s not! So there will be Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Doctor Who things that no one will ever see! And I’m going to deny the whole Duran Duran thing.
There have been quite a few scholars – at M.I.T. and other respected academic venues, particularly in the area of Popular Culture Studies – who have elevated Fan Writing to the level of a new form of literature. What’s your take on that?
Will they send a note to my mother saying that I haven’t wasted years of effort?
Seriously, I think fan literature goes back to the Neolithic where the tribal shaman told a story about how the sun god and the moon goddess argued and created day and night, and some clever Neolithic chick said "You know, the sun god and the earth goddess is just hot. And the sun god and the river god is totally hot." Fanfic and slash in one swell foop! Which is why we have variations on myth, the Apocrypha and Elvis sightings.