Working Stiffs Interview with Dasha K.

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Working Stiffs Interview with Dasha K.
Interviewer: Nicola Simpson
Interviewee: Dasha K.
Date(s): October-December 2000 (date of interview), February 16, 2001 (date of posting)
Medium: online
Fandom(s): X-Files
External Links: part one; part two; part one reference link; part two reference link
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Working Stiffs Interview with Dasha K. was conducted in 2000.

It was posted to the website Working Stiffs.

Other Interviews in the Series

Some Excerpts

I don't know how many I've been nominated for and won. I'd guess that I've won something like fifteen Spooky Awards, but to be perfectly honest, I don't like to talk about them. While it's been an honor to win them, there always seems to be such ugliness and resentment about the award process. I heard a LOT of second-hand backbiting about the awards I won after last year's Spookys and it really hurt my feelings. I'm sort of confused about the whole thing and I'm still considering dropping out of this year's Spooky Awards... I don't want to sound completely down on fanfic awards. I think that the Spooky Awards are very well-run and are generally fair. The Spooky volunteers put in a huge amount of time and effort. It's been a huge honor for me to win the awards that I have. I just think that the fanfic world is often rife with petty jealousy and back-talking. And believe me, I don't exempt myself from that. We all do, it's natural. But people get so weird about awards. I've seen friends in tears because they didn't win anything. I've seen insanely talented writers suddenly convinced that their writing sucks because they didn't win something. I've seen people whom I thought were friends of mine suddenly telling others that I didn't deserve the awards I won, that I had no talent and I was all hype. I've seen writers out and out campaign during the nomination process. It's just kind of...icky and hurtful.

The first stories I really loved were by some of the "classic" writers. I adored Lydia Bower, Jill Selby, Shalimar, etc. But I was really moved and excited by some of the newer writers at the time, whom I got to read and know through the now-defunct XAPEN mailing list. I remember, in my first fanfic year, being just blown away by the honest angst of Nascent's casefiles, by the edginess of Jennifer-Oksana's "Choirgirl" series, by the incredible imagery of jordan's "A Cold Angel Eye," and Plausible Deniability's searing humor in "The Carrot and the Stick" and "The Clock Watcher" and the precise third party perspective of Gwendolyn's "Silhouettes." I felt like I was reading this amazing new writers and getting so much inspiration from the way they took chances and broke new ground.

There was a period of about a year when belonging to XAPEN was a rare treat. It seemed like just about every writer posting there was horrifically talented and was pushing new ground. It was also one of the few venues where slash and gen writers mixed and mingled freely, where I'd get feedback from slash writers on MSR and slash writers would be praised to the skies by shippers. I *gorged* on fanfic then. XAPEN also helped me feel free to push the boundaries of my writing-- to try Skinner/Scully and Scullyslash and even Mulder/Krycek (which I wrote under a different pen name).

As for my voice, it was a struggle finding it. I think that my first dozen or so stories weren't told the way I really wanted to tell them. I was still working on trying to keep the grammar and spelling clean, to figure out quotation marks and I was muddling through finding characterization. It took the precise touch of Plausible Deniability, my friend and beta reader, to help me find my own voice as a writer. I'd say that the first stories I told that read the way I wanted them to were probably in the Red Valerian series. They just flowed out of me over time and I was so surprised that I could tell a story in the voice of a gruff, macho, ex-Marine in his late forties. In the beginning, I could only tell a story from Scully's POV and here I was doing Skinner! It felt very freeing. But I couldn't have done it without my beta readers and without Plausible Deniability giving me his encouragement and honesty.

Mailing lists are a beautiful thing. The tone is completely different from ATXC. The newsgroup is unmoderated, which is good. The fanfic world needs a place where we can rant, piss, moan, be silly, be off-topic. Even the flame wars are a necessary evil, in my opinion. But mailing lists are different. Usually they have a tone set by the moderator(s). If someone misbehaves, flames or just acts idiotic on-list, there's always the option of kicking them off.

There are literally hundreds of lists for writers and readers of X-Files fanfic to choose from these days, which is nice. No matter what your teeny, tiny specialty is, there's a list for you. Are you a teenaged writer looking for other teenagers to chat with? There's a list for you. Do you want to read and discuss stories about Skinner spanking Mulder? Yep-- there's a list for that, too. You can find kindred spirits to talk to and support for your own writing.

ATXC, for me, has mostly been a place for me to drop by and glance at the weirdness. Sometimes I get involved, but usually I sit back and lurk. I'm much more involved with the mailing list world. Actually, I only belong to a few lists these days. The biggest and most important would have to be Scullyfic, since I'm one of the list administrators. For my money, you can't beat it as a list. (Okay, maybe I'm a *little* prejudiced, but I felt this way long before I became an admin.) First of all, some of the best writers in fanfic post stories there. The list is structured around a daily topic which relates to the show (especially Scully-centric things), or fanfic, or writing in general. There's very little off-topicness on the list, yet it still manages to be a silly, lighthearted and fun list a lot of the time.

I've made some of my best fic friends on this list. And the best part is that there is a consistently adult tone to the list. There's very little backbiting and in-fighting and the members always seem to have a lot of respect for each other. It's a rare and wonderful place to hang out. The only drawback is the high volume of posts to the list. We have 500 members (in fact, we have a cap of 500 members so that the list doesn't go completely insane with posts) and that often means more than 100 posts a day. Still, it's my favorite place to be on the net.

Writing original characters is such a blast, because you aren't bound by the characterization on the actual show. But it's also a challenge to create an original, compelling voice, to make someone new three-dimensional to readers and not have her be a "Mary Sue." <g> Amy Callahan was a character I created early in my fanfic career (I always feel weird about using the term "career." I mean, it's not like anyone is paying me.) in the vignette "Musings of a Professional Girl." I envisioned her as a breezy, intelligent call girl with a good sense of humor and a touch of the amoral. After I wrote the vignette, I sort of forgot about it until Plausible Deniability were casting about for an idea for a case file for us to write together. We sort of used the original vignette as a template for her character, building from the basics set out there. We wanted to make her complex, a woman who on the outside seems to really have her shit together, but who is always feeling like she has to justify the way she makes her money and lives her life.

Well, I don't think I really need to justify writing slash. Why write MSR? Why write case files? For me, my occasional foray into slash is fun, it's something different, it's a challenge and it's a nice break from MSR. And I've enjoyed writing the original character of May, a sometime partner of Scully's in the Jitterbug Perfume series.

Why slash? I'm probably repeating myself, but I found it an irresistible challenge to write Scully with another woman and make it halfway believable. But to tell you the truth, I never sat down one day and said to myself, "Hmm, I think I'll write some Scully slash today." In fact, before I wrote it, I don't think I'd actually read any slash with Scully in it. What happened was I got a idea for a story. I was on my way to work and I got this image of Mulder, on the second floor of a dance club, watching the dancers below. I pictured him seeing a woman who looked like Scully, in a very hot outfit, dancing with another woman and then I saw her kissing the woman. It was just this flash, but then I had to know what happened. Why was Scully kissing some random woman in a club? Why was Mulder there, too? What did he think of this? Would there be a confrontation? My mind started working overtime on it and before I knew it, the story was writing itself.

As for reading Scully slash, I actually don't read a ton of it. :::hangs head in shame::: I just don't. For one thing, there's not a ton of it out there and quite a bit of it seems to be formulaic. But there are some terrific Scully slash writers who are great to read-- Izzy Izenthe, Katharine F., Selena Koontz, Fialka,to name a few.

I don't think there's any advice for writing slash that really differs from writing gen fanfic. Just stay true to the show's characterizations. Oh, and if you're unsure about what you're writing about, do some research. There's actually a number of web pages for female writers of male-male slash, so they can get to know the "mechanics" of gay sex. Ah, I LOVE fanfic!

Does [slash] break from the show's characterizations? Before last season, a lot of slash writers were able to say, with some pretty good justification, that there was just as much UST between Mulder and Krycek as there was between Mulder and Scully. Granted, it was hard to see Mulder being with a guy who'd killed his father and assisted in Scully's abduction (the main reason why I have issues with the M/K coupling) but you also couldn't deny the raw, simmering sex appeal that was generated between the two men. Also, I don't think it's too hard to see Mulder as bisexual. I can see him being experimental at Oxford or having the occasional relationship with a man. I haven't read tons and tons of slash, but I've read some stories that seem incredibly plausible. In torch's "Ghosts," the relationship that springs up between Mulder and Krycek happens with a very natural and real touch. Same with the relationship between Mulder and Tristan in Cathleen Faye's amazing "Wind River." It's not like Mulder wakes up one day in these stories and says, "Boy, I feel gay today!" He happens to meet someone or spend a lot of time with a particular man and the attraction grows from there. But he's still the Mulder we see on the show and in the best kind of fanfic. But yeah, there's also slash that has characters wildly out of character, where Scully is a screaming man-hating shrew, where Mulder is a pretty-boy puppyish bottom, where Skinner is the avuncular master-top with a whip. I especially take issue with slash that refuses to deal with the Scully question and the fact that no matter what, Mulder loves Scully. Whether or not that's a romantic love can certainly be debated but I don't think you can argue that he doesn't have any love for her at all. There's a number of slash stories that either reduce her to a walk-on character, don't feature her at all, or have her as this horrible, megabitch who hates Mulder and makes his life so miserable he has to flee into the arms of Uncle Walter or Alex the Wonder Boy.

The pregnancy on the show scares the crap out of me, to be perfectly honest. Not that I don't find it believable or interesting, it's just that I don't trust Chris Carter anymore. He's really proved that he doesn't care about the backstories of his characters and that he's perfectly willing to re-write history at will when it gets in the way of his plotlines. I just have a very bad and sinking feeling that something terrible is going to happen. And that makes me angry, because the show could be *so* good if he'd just pay a little more attention to the interesting people who inhabit his little world. But I will admit that I was surprised and delighted by the end of "Requiem." I had studiously avoided spoilers, so it was a real shocker to me. So, that was fun but I'm worried about where all of this is going to go. If Scully ends up with a freakish, mutant child, I swear to god that I'll personally go pay dear Chris a friendly little visit to set him straight about a thing or two.

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