Interview: sinecure
1) If you could visit any place at any time period, where would you go and what would you do?
The future! When there are flying cars and weekend trips to Mars. 2) Have you ever met anyone famous?
Met? Not quite. But I went to a writing convention once and Frank Marshall was there… does that count? I know I’m forgetting someone here.
3) If you could meet any famous person, alive or dead, who would it be and what would you say/do?
I actually don’t have a burning need to meet any famous people. I’d probably just make a fool out of myself anyway.
4) If you could switch lives with any person, who would you choose and why? If you want to switch with a person who is dead, we’ll assume that you wanted to live their life while he/she was alive.
Switch lives with? Hmm. I’m boring, but no one. Not because my life is so fabulous, but I just don’t see the draw of being someone famous. Besides, if I were that person, he/she wouldn’t be the person I like so much. He/she would be me, and that wouldn’t be fabulous.
5) Who is your favorite author, alive or dead, and why?
Stephen King. Hands down. He’s the master of horror and nostalgia. I just love the way he weaves scary, interesting, fantastic stories and makes you love the characters so much.
6) What is your favorite book and why?
I don’t have a favorite. Really, anything by Stephen King. Although Desperation comes to Mind. It. The Shining. Cell. That one so needs to be made into a movie.
7) Who is your favorite singer, alive or dead, and why?
Many of them. Tom McRae is in the top three. The Decemberists. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones… so many favorites. Why? Because they make fantastic music, of course. Tom and The Decemberists are about the lyrics and the music, nothing is left out of their songs. They’re catchy and angsty and full of horrible things all at once. The Decemberists have a horrid sense of humor in their music that amuses me to no end.
8.) What is your favorite song and why?
Right now? It changes all the time. Currently it’s… anything by Tom McRae really. Right now, it’s “Summer of John Wayne”… and “The Ballad of Amelia Earhart”. Also “The Girl Who Falls Down Stairs”, and “Houdini and the Girl”. Um, yeah. All by Tom McRae. All of The Decemberists’ new album as well.
9) What is your favorite movie and why?
Don’t have one. I love a lot of movies. Um, Scream is one of my top 5. I like horror films. And Sci-fi and action. Die Hard… love those.
10) What is your favorite television show and why?
I have so many, don’t make me choose. In no specific order: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (classic and new), Angel, Farscape, La Femme Nikita, Firefly, Alias, Leverage, Burn Notice, Eureka, Dead Like Me, Veronica Mars, The X-Files, Andromeda, Dexter, Medium, Sanctuary, How I Met Your Mother. They’re all very fantastic shows in their own way. Not all of them are the best, but I love every single one of them.
11) Who is your favorite actor/actress, alive or dead, and why?
Sheesh. Got an hour? I’ve always had trouble narrowing these things down to one. Allison Mack, Michael Rosenbaum, Christopher Walken, Tommy Lee Jones, Patrick Stewart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jodie Foster, Denzel Washington… and on and on. Why. You always want to know why. I really don’t know. I just like them a lot. I could watch them read the phone book and be entertained.
12) What is the one movie/television show that you would never admit to family, friends, co-workers that you watch? Yes, I know asking defeats the point, but spill your guts anyway.
Um, Smallville? Really, this is the show that I want to cringe away from admitting to watching. Movie? So many. None that I can actually remember/think of right now.
13) Do people in your Real Life know that you are a member of NS?
Some do. Not that I go around explaining what it is. They know I belong to Smallville boards and am in the fandom online.
14) Do people in your Real Life know that you read/write fanfiction and make fanart?
Yep. No, I don’t show them. They probably suspect that I write smut, but… I don’t talk about it.
15) When did you first start reading fanfiction?
About 1999? I mention it down there in question #22. Between seasons 3 and 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It started with Spike/Buffy, but I kept seeing a bunch for Spike/Willow and I got curious. I wondered why anyone would pair those two up. I was hooked with the first one I read. I think it was called Shattered. Wow. I should find it. Anyway, I read more and more and then started writing it myself. Spike/Willow is my OTP for BtVS.
16) When did you first get started in writing fanfiction/making fanart?
About 2000 or 2001. That’s when the fanfic started. The art started before that. Really badly done banners and captioned caps for my website that is gone now, yay.
17) Is fanfic writing just a hobby for you or do you hope to go further with your writing?
It’s just a hobby. Though I dabble/dabbled with original stories for a while.
18) When you aren’t writing awesome fanfics or making fanart, what do you do and/or want to be doing?
I read, watch tv, go outside and live life to some extent. I watch movies, I see family and friends. Nothing exciting like Martian Ballroom Dancing or Planetary Judo competitions… yet. *eyes the future*
19) How and why did you first get interested in Chlex? What do you like most about the characters? What do you hate about them?
Someone on my friends list on LiveJournal talked about the show a lot. I finally decided to watch it when the 5th season was starting to air. I went through the show very quickly and by the time I got to season 3 I was a Chlex lover. Their chemistry and their similar lives just grabbed me and never let me go again. I love everything about them; the lightness, the dark, the areas in between, the protectiveness he showed toward her, even as he was being selfish. Just… everything about them is chemistry and potential.
I hate that the writers never gave them a chance on the show because they would’ve been so frelling hot. They’d have made Clark and Lana look like 5-year-olds playing house, and that scared them. Then again, I’m also glad that we never got the horrible ending and bad writing that would’ve come from the writers getting a hold of these two.
20) How and why did you first get interested in writing Chlex fanfiction and making fanart?
I got into Chlex fic rather quickly while watching the show. I stopped watching in season 5 because I couldn’t stand the crap and the Lexana headed toward the screen. And Lois. I found NS pretty early on, devoured the fic there, and started to write my own. My computer crashed and I lost it all, then moved on to Doctor Who. Came back after leaving the DW fandom and regained my fics from my old computer drive and I’m working on getting them all written and fixed and… yeah, my characterization was bad.
21) Is there anything while reading Chlex fanfiction that you really like/hate? Anything in fanart?
Yes.
22) What (if any) other fandoms do you read/write/make fanart for and why?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s the first fandom I got into years ago. During the break between seasons 3 and 4 I went looking for spoilers–didn’t know that was what they were called at the time–and found something called fanfic. I was hooked from that moment on. I made horrible art and started writing. Got better at both, started posting. The rest is history.
Doctor Who. That’s my second fandom that I started writing for. I loved the love story between the Doctor and Rose, and didn’t see enough of what I wanted to see on the show, so I sought out fic. Funnily enough, I stayed away from the smut fics, feeling it was just wrong… but gradually I read some. Then more. Then I began to write it myself, and became a sort of smut whore for Doctor Who.
I’ve done artwork for way too many fandoms to name here. I do icons–avatars–for nearly every show I’ve gotten into. To name a few: Alias, Veronica Mars, Charmed, Supernatural, Buffy, Angel, My So-Called Life, Dexter, Farscape, the two main Stargates… and on and on. I just love making icons and banners and wallpapers.
23) What type of environment do you need to write and/or make fanart? For example: extreme quiet, blaring music, subtle background noise, etc.
Depends. For fics, I can work with blaring music, tv going, talking to someone online, whatever. Same with art. Art I can do while doing anything, I don’t need a lot of focus and concentration for artwork. Fics, I go back and forth. Sometimes I need complete silence, other times, I like music to be playing, or to guide my thoughts along a certain route.
24) How do your ideas come to you? Do you always write them or do you let them disappear?
I try to write them down as ideas, then leave them and go back to what I’m working on. More often I end up writing them all out and working on 50 billion fics at once.
25) Do you plan a story from the beginning to end or start with an idea and let the chapters come to you as they do?
I get an idea, a line, a prompt word, a thought, something basic and simple, and I write from there. If it’s a long fic, I’ll plot it out to some extent, but not every little detail. That’s too limiting, and I’ve learned my lesson with that. It boxes me in and I feel like I have to follow that plan and it kills my imagination.
26) Do you ever input certain aspects about yourself into the lives of Chloe and Lex? For example: Do you have Chloe listen to your favorite song or have Lex watch your favorite movie?
Occasionally, though I can’t remember specifics. Nothing major, just a like or a dislike. A feeling of being sick when I feel sick. Little things like that. Once I had a character dream about a show that I liked and I still cringe when I think about it. I hate referencing things like that in fic. It pulls me out of the story, but I was young and stupid then.
27) Do you associate your writing with any songs even if it isn’t a songfic?
I’ve written stories based on a song, or a lyric. I often listen to a song on repeat while I’m writing a fic or chapter.
28) Do you prefer writing easy, quick stories or long, layered stories?
Quick. I tend to do quick one-shots because they’re so much easier. No answers beyond what you write are needed, no completion beyond your ending. I also like longer ones. I’m writing quite a few right now, and they’re kicking my butt. In the Doctor Who fandom, momdaegmorgan and I created “Glimpses” series, short, one-shots that showed glimpses of the Doctor and Rose’s lives together throughout years, all un-connected. I loved writing those.
The longer ones are harder for me, but I’m trying.
29) Which do you find easier to write: dialogue or description or are the equally hard/easy?
Oh, boy. Ask me at any time of the day and you’ll get a different answer each time. I have trouble with all of it. Sometimes all of it is easy, most times it’s just hard. It also depends on the fandom and the pairing. Smallville is hard. Lex is really hard.
Doctor Who… I find the Tenth Doctor easy to write, Rose and Nine? Not so much.
Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes so easily to me, but Spike doesn’t.
So, it really depends.
30) Is there anything that you won’t write or feel uncomfortable writing?
Mpreg. That is never, ever going to be written by me. M/M slash. Not because I’m uncomfortable with it, I just have no interest in any M/M slash pairings. I’ve written borderline F/F slash for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
31) What do you do to cure writer’s block? What advice can you give to new writers who might be scared to post their stories?
I cure writer’s block by writing. There’s no other way to get past it aside from ignoring the story and moving on to another fic. If that’s blocked too? I just sit down and make myself write.
I’d say post and feel good about yourself. No matter what, you wrote something that, hopefully, you like and are proud of, and that’s an awesome feat.
32) Have you ever read someone else’s fanfic and wished you thought of the idea first?
All. The. Time. I am always coming across fics that use ideas that I wish I’d thought of first.
33) Have you ever wanted someone else to write your story idea?
Yes! I’ve actually given away story ideas and helped plot them.
34) Are reviews vital to keep you writing or will you finish a story even if you aren’t certain people are reading?
They’re vital for my writing self-esteem. I’ll probably write regardless, but if I feel like no one is reading my stories, I get discouraged easily. I know, I know, I should write for myself, and blah, blah, but everyone feels better when they get feedback or comments or reviews. Everyone.
35) Have you ever had a review that made you think something about your story that you never thought of before? Has a review ever made you want to make a major change to your story?
Yeah, there were a few on my Doctor Who fics that made me include some things I hadn’t thought about before. Nothing major though.
36) How badly do you want to write for Smallville or at least rewrite some of the seasons?
The show would have to move to the Playboy channel if I wrote for it, and most of the other characters would be gone. I’d love to rewrite all of it with a Chlex theme, but I’m way too lazy.
37) Do you see Chloe and Lex or other Smallville characters in different television shows or movies? Meaning, do you watch a movie like Star Wars and start thinking that Lex is just like Han Solo? Perhaps use those ideas to make manips?
Nope. Not really.
38) What do you think AM and MR would say about your fics if they read them? Or if they saw your fanart? How would you feel if someone from the show did read your writings?
Hm, I’d hope they’d be like an actor from a certain show that actually came across someone’s NC-17 fic on LiveJournal and left nice comments to the author. I’d probably end up with a restraining order though.
39) If you could have any super power, what would it be and why? Would you use it for good or evil?
I couldn’t choose. All of them. I’d use them for both. There is no purely good or purely evil. I’m a lover of the gray area… in fic anyway. 
