MEGAN: Tell me a little about yourself.

DESLEA: I'm a 26 year old Australian woman, and I'm an at-home parent with a four-year-old boy. I'm a graduate student, in the middle of an undergraduate degree in Law and a graduate degree in Theology, both of which are on hold until midyear. I am a freelance writer, as well, and I write mostly factual articles and academic works for publication. I was a major contributor to the Dictionary of Christian Biography, which will be released by the UK's Heythrop University in a couple of months; and I also won the Australia Press Council Prize in 1994 for an essay on ethics in journalism. Beyond the professional side of things, I am a poor, but avid linguist. I've studied French, Koine Greek, Ancient Hebrew, and Latin - and I'm not fluent in any of them (ROTFL). I'm working a little on Russian now. Oh - and I spend much, much, MUCH too much time online. I'm known for letting my email mount up for three months, then replying to a thousand emails in a week to catch up. This miffs a few people *deep blush*.

Online, I can usually be found at xdesign, the mailing list for x-artists; Glass Onion, an alternative fiction list; and a handful of other places. I maintain http://xfiles.deslea.com/, a suite of X-Files homepages including my fiction, X-Files art, X-Files music video, a huge supporting character image archive, and my jewel, Blondie's Ratcave, a 100MB website devoted to the pairing of Alex Krycek and Marita Covarrubias. My biggest online involvement is in X-Files fan fiction, which I've been sharing online since 1996. Beyond my present works-in-progress, I am involved in other creative XF-related projects. These include collaboration on The Time Magazine Mulder Project, which is a mockup edition of TIME in the light of the events of This Is Not Happening; contributing to Katie's forum The Truth Is A Bitch; compiling a Krycek/Marita anthology in eBook format; and collaborating with the 2001 Spooky Awards. I've had the honour of being recognised from time to time, which means a lot to even the most self-confident writer. In my case, I've had recognition as a Spookys finalist on three occasions, as well as B.I.T.T. and Fluffy awards and a Wirerims nomination. I've been thrilled to be recommended by Primal Screamers, A Quiet Place To Read and Museans, as well. I'm a periodic contributor to alt.tv.x-files.creative; but I have an unfortunate habit of getting too involved in controversial discussions, so I try to keep my involvement there to a minimum. There are times in one's life when one must put sanity ahead of intellectual stimulation *g*.

MEGAN: How did you get into the X-Files? How did you get started writing fanfic?

DESLEA: Well, I have to delve into a bit of ancient history to answer that one. I'm a childhood abuse survivor, and I was kept more or less a prisoner for a year at one stage. Now, people who have been held hostage, especially children, often attest to the power of television during captivity. It keeps them in touch with something approaching the normal world, and fills in the gaps to some extent about social mores and etiquette and how people speak and how they relate and how they view the world around them. That was very much the case for me. During a time of absolute unreality, television - and soap operas in particular - kept me in touch with a vague understanding of what it was to be a human being; and not surprisingly, I grabbed at it. When I wasn't watching it, I was writing about it or daydreaming about it. It was total immersion. So for me, that was the beginning of fanfic, long before I'd heard the term, or knew that other people did it too. That didn't come until I got on the Internet in 1996. By then, I'd written an XF novel, Offspring, with little idea that there would be a forum for it. I can't begin to explain how thrilled I was when I found atxfc.

As far as the X-Files goes... I watched it for about half the first season - when it came out here in Australia, it was starting to make waves in the US media - and then I sort of went off it. I can't remember why - it might have just been that there was something just as good on another channel. I started watching it sporadically around the time of Duane Barry, and got pretty interested in it then. It was about that time that I started buying the merchandise and all that. Then came the Anasazi trilogy, and that was just the last straw. To me, that trilogy has all the best elements of XF. There was no keeping me away after that. I did go off it a little in Seasons 5-7 - I got to a point where I only watched mythology episodes - but now with Doggett I feel the show has had a breath of fresh air. It's fantastic.

MEGAN: Which story that you've written are you proudest of? Why?

DESLEA: At any given time, I will usually be proudest of one of my most recent; simply because - hopefully - I grow and change as an author with every story I write. The two that come to mind right now are a short Krycek/Marita vignette called Hands, and a Krycek/Marita mythology novel I finished late last year, Not My Lover. Hands placed in the B.I.T.T. Awards for Angst, and was recommended by Museans and A Quiet Place To Read; and Not My Lover made the Spooky finals in two categories and was commended in the B.I.T.T.s; so that opinion seems to reflect the consensus among my readers, as well.

I'm proud of Hands because, although it's only a few pages long, it explores a very powerful theme, and I think it does so with a lot of empathy. It wasn't one of my favourites when I wrote it for a lot of reasons - and those personal criticisms I hold for the work are still valid - but it's grown on me quite a lot. The idea was that the loss of Alex's arm had severed something irrevocable in his personality or his soul, and that was expressed in Marita's awareness of the difference in how he touched her now. His right hand was the purposeful hand, the one he used to stimulate her or strip her or whatever; but his left hand was the one he used to cradle her cheek or stroke her hair. She felt loved when he touched her with that hand, and now that it was gone, something had happened to their relationship, reflecting that. It was a very sad piece, and that was difficult for me because I like endings that are at least hopeful, if not happy... but it had a raw honesty about it. It explored the human drama of two people faced with this terrible loss - a part of himself.

[Some of the content in the following three paragraphs is extracted from the author's afterword of Not My Lover.]

Not My Lover is one of my best works for a lot of reasons. It had a lot of basic strengths in terms of the writing craft. It was probably the first piece I've done in which I felt I had a good command of the first person POV. But the biggest appeal for me is that it explored a lot of things, philosophically and otherwise, that I'd been itching to tackle in my writing. For one thing, it's an exploration of what good and evil might really mean in the context of the threat of the colonists. Is good, absolute good? Is it the greatest good for the greatest number? And is the only real evil that of doing nothing?

I also like Not My Lover because it's a story that honours marriage, which is something that is really important to me on a personal level. Alex and Marita marry very early, in the first chapter; and there's an ongoing theme to the effect that it's the strength and the permanence of their marriage that enables them to serve as a counter-Consortium. Their work and their family are so bound up together that they couldn't have succeeded otherwise. Although it's explored in a humanistic rather than a religious context, the underlying theme is definitely grounded in my understanding of marriage as a Catholic. I am indebted to discussions with other Catholic authors as far as this aspect of my work is concerned, especially my dear friend Mary Mastrangelo, with whom I've discussed the issue of Catholicity in writing over several years. A lot of people were intrigued by the idea of Alex, in particular, as a married man; but actually, that makes a lot of sense to me. He is an extreme man who is extremely dedicated to a cause and lives it out in an extreme way; and historically, the most extreme men - both good and evil - have been married. This is not a man who is afraid of commitment. He embraces it - in all its forms.

I like Marita a great deal in Not My Lover. She suffers greatly in the story - they both do - and I like the whole picture of her being very desolate but still being her own person who has a lot of inner power and ability to do what she needs to do. She is felled, but not broken. I like reading angst, but I don't like angst equated with weakness. There's too much of that, in fiction and in the real world. I don't believe it has to be that way. Marita suffers, but she is not a victim. I like Alex in the book, as well; but my reasons for liking him are harder to pin down than for Marita. I think he has a lot of clarity and honesty about his own nature. Like all of us, he doesn't always understand why he does what he does; but he doesn't really whitewash his actions, to himself or others. He's seen enough really bad stuff in his life that he doesn't indulge in the interpersonal nonsense most of us indulge in. He recognises its absurdity and needlessness. He doesn't play mind-games with Marita. He has no macho inhibitions about being perceived as a loving husband by the few who are admitted to their very private world. At the same time, though, he doesn't indulge in false sentiment. His romanticism is very restrained - almost mundane. Alex is stripped bare in Not My Lover - bare of bullshit, bare of trimmings. He's as close to raw humanity as you can be.

In terms of other fiction of which I'm most proud, there are a couple of honourable mentions. My second fic, On The Outside (1996) was, in retrospect, a kind of precursor to Not My Lover. Like Not My Lover, it was a good-evil tug-of-war from a conspirator point-of-view. It was understated and classy. It was Samantha/Other, and a lesbian clone Other at that. It was a bit off the beaten track, a bit controversial; and I thought that about five people would read it. It made the Spooky finals for drama that year. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The funny thing is, I was much less invested in that fic than another fic I wrote the same year (Offspring), and I was very puzzled that On The Outside was nominated when Offspring wasn't. With the distance of time, though, I can see why it happened that way; and I now consider On The Outside the stronger, and more enjoyable, fic of the two.

The other honourable mention - also from 1996 - is Borderline, an unfinished novel. Borderline works with a scenario in which Mulder suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder (which, by the way, is probably a fair diagnosis, on the basis of his onscreen behaviour). I got so much feedback from people who had the disorder, or knew someone with the disorder, who were really touched by it. It was too difficult to finish - I have cared for people with mental illness, and it hit a lot of nerves - but because I still get requests for it five years later, I refuse to close the door on it totally. It's still on the agenda, but I don't know if it will ever be finished.

MEGAN: For a lot of writers, fanfiction is a place to experiment with different things. Do you use it that way, too? Or have the forays into different POVs and tenses blossomed out of the stories you were trying to tell? Present tense and mixed POVs are especially difficult to master - did you learn or develop any tips or tricks along the way?

DESLEA: Hmm... I think those areas developed mostly out of the stories I've wanted to tell. As a reader, I have a great deal of suspicion of first-person pieces, because it's very rare for a person to really write down, or say, exactly what they do or did. Even diarists usually document moods rather than scenes (as far as I am aware). For me, a first-person piece makes no sense, and has a bizarre sort of unreality to it, unless I know why this story is being written down. In other words, for me as a reader, a first-person piece finds its reality in its context and its audience. This is true even of published works, even those by my favourite writers such as Agatha Christie and Stephen King.

As a consequence, the first person pieces I have written, by and large, have had a whole context to do with who was writing them and for what purpose. My first first-person POV was On The Outside, and it was meant to be a collection of letters by one of the Colony clones to the real Samantha. (In the end it was bigger than that - I revised it into a case file with corresponding journal notes by Samantha - but the principle remained.) I wanted to get into a clone's head and work out what it was like to have no history or parents... not just absent parents or bad parents, but no parents at all. Absolute displacement. And I didn't think I could do that from a third person narrative. So, yes, that arose from the story I wanted to tell.

Not My Lover and Love Will Keep Me Alive - my first full-length first-person pieces - are essentially protracted letters to Walter Skinner, from Marita and Alex explaining their version of events (although I imagine they did some selective editing before really sending them). Mare is clearly a diarist since childhood, and her chapters are written in real time in response to unfolding events. There's a rawness to them. Alex is not a diarist, and he's writing in retrospect at the time of collating their accounts. So he has the perspective of a third-person narrator, in a sense, even though he writes first-person. That was something that evolved - my picture of who was writing when grew with time - but it added something to the story... it made the stories both reflective, insightful retrospectives and real-time newsreels. It's been the best of both worlds.

You can play with POV a bit to get out of a sticking point, and I think people forget that, especially when writing first person. It's easy to think, "I can't write that, because I'm writing Alex, and Alex doesn't know what's in Marita's head." But that's not quite true. Alex doesn't know what's in Marita's head, but he could and would make some pretty good guesses. People who have been intimate usually can. And that can be very powerful, even when the guess is wrong. It can shed a lot of light on the emotional landscape. People are aware of others, and if we don't work that into how our characters reflect on their situations, then I think they come off as one-dimensional and self-absorbed. At the same time, though, we can take that to the extreme where the person becomes infallible - where our POV character's perceptions are always just right - and that isn't realistic. In one piece I'm working on at the moment, a young Alex and Marita are forging a relationship and she's oddly reticent (sexually). There's a whole context behind that, to do with mixed messages she got in adolescence and young adulthood, as a result of her family's involvement in the conspiracy. She can't even really articulate what the problem is, and Alex is trying to understand and help her. Anyway, I made a fatal flaw - I assumed that Alex was on the right track all along. It was only a week ago that I realised that, in reality, he would almost certainly wonder whether she'd been raped. It just suddenly hit me - the reason it wasn't coming together was that I was working from a flawed premise. It's sometimes very difficult to work from what someone knows when you know more than they do - it's a bit like playing a game of strategy with yourself, like Battleship or Scrabble. No matter how hard you try, you can't quite keep the other side's playing field out of your vision. It takes a lot of discipline and mental delineation to keep mixed POV under control.

Speaking in general terms, I do not have the consistency of tense (particularly in first person work) that some purists would like (nor, for that matter, of mixed POV). I am a purist in many other ways, but these inconsistencies don't really bother me, either as a reader or a writer, as long as they aren't extreme. People do change tense when they speak, either unconsciously or for effect. Something that happened many years ago might be told in present tense because it still seems so real. That doesn't have to be a barrier to good storytelling, and sometimes it can actually aid it.

Similarly, there are people who hold that a third person narrative should only use one person's POV for a whole scene. While I think that *can* be done effectively, I don't think it's strictly necessary. I think of a third person narrator as kind of a demi-god with a capacity to take account of a number of inner and outer POVs in one viewing. It's not necessarily Person A - whether that's a mythical fly on the wall or a casual observer - saying what Person B did when s/he confronted Persons C and D. It's more like a photojournalist watching from a helicopter, zooming in with a lens on Person B, then Person C and Person D. Do it too fast and you get dizzy; but moving between them at an appropriate pace can give you a better big picture than staying on Person B; and you don't necessarily have to lose the personal and the intimate. Stephen King's account of Charlie, Andy, Cap Hollister and Rainbird in the stables in Firestarter is a brilliant example of this skill in action. I think I've mastered these techniques enough to be a good storyteller, but probably not enough to satisfy an English professor. And I think that's okay.

I think my best tip, when working with these techniques, would be to shoot for good storytelling. It is okay to break the rules, as long as you know them in yourself, know why they're there, and know why breaking them will tell the story better. I think the rules of writing are pivotal - I don't agree with throwing them out - but always as storytellers our duty is to our readers, not to our rules. Our rules serve the reader, not the other way around. If we have a turn of phrase that is not technically accurate or grammatically correct, but which sums up a mood perfectly, it disserves our readers not to use it. Again, Stephen King is a master of this. He knows exactly when to use the inaccurate for effect. Just as one example, when recounting an explosion in The Stand, he uses the shorthand "Whafuck?" (for "What the fuck?") when giving the thoughts of a dazed, injured character who has just been thrown clear. To me, that one non-word sums up her disorientation better than a page of descriptives.

MEGAN: Which story that you've written is your least favorite? Why?

DESLEA: Definitely Lyrics of the Heart, an awful unfinished piece I'm still trying to get off all the archives. This was an MSR, character-death by suicide - first Mulder, then Scully. I wrote it when I was suicidal after the death of my partner by suicide, and it is the most indulgent, self-destructive piece of writing I've ever done. It bears no real relationship to the characters, even though it is situated in post-Memento Mori canon. The parts that made it to USENET weren't too terrible; but some of the later parts were incredibly dark. It frightens me to read those now. I honestly believe if I'd finished that story I would have killed myself. I was embracing the darkness instead of fighting it, and aside from the rights and wrongs of that, it was incredibly unfair to play that out in the public forum in that way. I look at some of the parts I didn't post and think, My God, what if a depressed teenager had read that? I have written a lot of basically good stories with significant flaws, but that's the one that stands out as something that should never have been written or posted.

MEGAN: What's the writing process like for you? Do you have a set process?

DESLEA: The process has evolved over the years. I've broadened my horizons from the straight, third-person-narrative novel framework I began with, and so the process has become more flexible. It's had to accommodate changing to a first-person point of view, on occasion; it's had to accommodate a mix of third- and first-person POV; it's had to accommodate present-tense. That said, there is always a basic idea - and that initial idea is almost always a theme - a way of seeing a character or situation - rather than a plot. Not My Lover, for instance, began with the idea of exploring Krycek and Marita as a devotedly married couple, working for the good of humanity; albeit by some rotten means. I liked the perversity of the idea of exploring goodness and marriage in a RATfic - the challenge of it; the breaching of boundaries. There were a few loose ideas about scenes and plot threads. Then I tried to work out how well it fit the canon, and found that it fit extraordinarily well.

Once this is in place and before I go any further - and I always do this for anything longer than a vignette, especially if it's related to the mythology, as most of mine are - I make a detailed timeline, in coordination with one or more of the online timelines. I trim the entries that don't relate to my story, change them to blue in Word, then add the specifics of my story in relationship to it, in purple. It's very detailed, sometimes down to the day. The timeline for my current WIP, Love Will Keep Me Alive, is 40 pages long and took five weeks to write. It's laborious work. But it's the only way to get a firm grip on who knows what or does what at what stage of the story.

After that, I translate that into rough chapter delineations, and I have concrete goals about what I want to achieve in each chapter - for instance, in this chapter I want Marita to find out that she has a twin and I want her to respond in the following ways. This is what she should know at the end of the chapter, and this is what she doesn't yet know, and this is why she doesn't know (Who is hiding it? Who just doesn't know it, and why not?). Those goals will suggest a rough layout of scenes that might achieve those ends, and I'll sketch them out. Most times I'll do this for the whole story before I even start it.

This all sounds very intensive, and it is, but I really don't see any other way when it comes to the mythology. For instance, in my current work-in-progress, Marita is very close to X, and she's trying to find out something Deep Throat did in 1983. Since in this story X was in the Consortium by then, I needed a reason why he couldn't tell her. So I simply established earlier on that he'd been in Tunisia, checking on Conrad Strughold that year. It was a relatively minor detail in the scheme of things, but it would have been a major plot hole if I hadn't picked it up; and I wouldn't have picked it up without the timeline. I almost always know a hell of a lot more about my characters than what makes it into the story, and I think that pays off in more well-rounded characters.

When I speak of goals, I don't only mean events; though obviously any plot-driven piece will need a lot of attention to those. I also mean emotional development, and this part is much more intuitive. When I start a story, I usually know very early on what scenes will be key emotional scenes, key turning points - sometimes even before there's a timeline. So the chapter plan has to be able to stretch to accommodate that, and to accommodate any last-minute flashes of inspiration. So when I speak of goals and timelines and chapter plans, it all sounds very clinical - and it is - but that's only half the story. The fleshing that out and giving it feeling and beauty and meaning is pure intuition. And the fleshing is done one word at a time - there's just no other way.

I guess there are other aspects of the process - less central ones; ones I call on as needed. I try to really get into what's happening in a scene, especially a high-drama, high-action or high-emotion scene. I'll play it out physically sometimes - I have a rough Skinner impersonation and a Scully and a Krycek and a Marita and a Diana and an X - and I can usually tell, if I try to do it, whether it works. I can physically move my body to get a grip on how Krycek is holding Marita, and think, well, if I were holding someone I loved like this, where would my hand move next? It takes some of the random-ness out of the characters' responses - gives them a bit of a flow and a bit of consistency. Whenever I'm stuck, or a feel that a scene isn't working, that's how I work out what's wrong. So there are a lot of "pieces" of the process.

MEGAN: Do you understand the X-Files mythology? Are there good places online to try to get a handle on the convoluted mess it's become over 8 seasons?

DESLEA: I understand it better than many, and not as well as some. The mythology really only makes sense in the light of a lot of social disciplines - theology, morality, anthropology, sociology, biology. You can't make sense of the mythology without a sense of the world in which we live. The people who say they watch The X-Files, or write fanfic, for fun (rather than for some headier reason) - I'm not criticising that, in itself - but those people start off from the back foot in understanding the mythology. They may write very compelling angst or romance, or amusing humour; but I don't think they're equipped to write intriguing mythology. The mythology - and I'm about to draw another Stephen King parallel, I guess - the mythology is really eschatology - the end things, the final things about life and death and meaning amid the chaos of humanity in the universe. It's religious and humanistic and philosophical. It's heady stuff - and I guess that's why it spawns so much fanfic, far more than the other fandoms. JAG, Profiler, and The Practice all spring to mind as compelling, quality dramas; but there's maybe twenty small homepages of fanfic for all those shows combined. Contrast this with XF! The heady stuff of The X-Files draws the really smart people - the people who really think about things all the time. Those are the sorts of people who write.

As time has gone on, Chris Carter and his crew have gone further and further into their theology and philosophy, and I think that's a strength. That said, I think it will eventually be the show's downfall, as the intellectual demands of the underlying philosophical exploration increase, and as the psychic toll of that introspection grows. Some say he's losing the viewers with his alleged mistakes with his characters; but what's really happening is that he's losing whole sections of the demographic with each intellectual rung he climbs. Every time he says, "The characters serve the story" - by replacing them or killing them off or whatever - he alienates people who care more for the characters than the story. I love the characters and I understand why that upsets people - I'm not saying they're wrong - but philosophically, anything about the future of humanity takes precedence over the individuals involved, and for myself, I agree with Carter in most of the hard choices he's been making. And most people don't want to engage with the story to a point where they can accept that truth. The truth is, most people who watch TV don't want to think about it on that level. That's unfortunate; but I guess it's a reality of the medium and how people use it.

I don't think there is anywhere online that really puts the mythology together satisfactorily in a way that could make someone understand it in all its philosophical and human context. Either you think about things in a philosophical and eschatological way, or you don't. If you do, you'll have an innate grasp of the issues and the rich layers of meaning implied in the mythology, even if you don't have a handle on all the factual (or fictional *g*) details. If not, then you won't get it even if someone explains it, even if you know every minute fact, even if you comprehend intellectually why some other people see it that way.

If you want to understand it and make some kind of sense of it, I think you have to approach it like studying history. Go to source evidence - timelines and transcripts - and reflect on *every* person's experience, knowledge, and POV (not only the "winners" or the "good guys"), and what that means in the bigger scheme of things. And you have to interact that with emotion and morality and sociology and everything else - all the "-ologies" that make up the human drama - to get a grasp on the nexus. And even then, that grasp will only ever be partial. But there's a big payoff, because to get that grasp is also, to some degree, to get a grasp on the real world (whether by parallel or by contrast). It's lived philosophy.

Sorry. You shouldn't ask classically-trained theologians these sorts of questions. We can make anything relate to philosophy. *g*

MEGAN: Correct me if I'm wrong, but you've done a lot of writing lately of the Krycek/Marita variety. Why do you think you're drawn to that pairing? What's been the reaction of the general community?

DESLEA: *laughs* I've been credited by several people lately for bringing prominence to the Krycek/Marita niche. Certainly, there has been an increase in output, and a lot of it from people who wrote to me saying they hated the pairing until they read my fic or went to Blondie's Ratcave. I'd certainly *like* to be able to take the credit. However, I don't think that's really the case. Others were writing it before me; there was just less organisation to it. I think Krycek/Marita is an idea whose time has come - it's as simple as that.

For my part, I guess I reached a point in the mythology - probably around Two Fathers - where I lost respect for Mulder and Scully and gained respect for the Consortium. I reached a point where I felt that, if I were Mulder or Scully, and I had this knowledge about the forthcoming invasion, I wouldn't run around chasing stray mutants, or Consortium people who in some cases were working for good. If I were faced with this choice, I'd like to think that I'd defect to the group and devote all my resources to stopping colonisation - and if necessary, to reform from within. We've seen glimmers of that choice in the choices made by Diana, Krycek, Marita, and Deep Throat, among others. To stick with the X-Files, knowing what Mulder and Scully know, strikes me as a cop-out. It's choosing respectability over responsibility.

So by then the balance of respect was going towards the Consortium, even though I could hate the actions of individuals and admit that absolute power corrupts absolutely. That was a big part of it - a growing respect for the choices and, yes, compromises that the coming invasion called for. It appeals to me - and this is my theology background speaking - to dwell on the shades of gray that emerge in the moral framework of the consortium. Is there ever a time when amorality is a good? It brings up all sorts of questions that challenge me. That's not to say, necessarily, that I agree with the actions of Krycek, Marita and the others - even in their context - but it interests me, both intellectually and humanly, to explore those dilemmas through their eyes.

So that's the context. Then, to make it personal, Marita has always struck me as a fundamentally good person. She helped Mulder many times - at some risk to herself in some cases (Tunguska, Patient X). She encouraged Skinner to come forward about the smallpox experiments that killed the children in South Carolina - probably against the orders of her superiors. She took a one-armed man as her lover, apparently without batting an eyelid about the fact - and fair or not, I suspect that's pretty rare. There are only two things she did wrong onscreen, which is a pretty good batting average by X-Files standards. One of these was taking the boy from Alex, which may or may not have been a betrayal (we only have WMM's word that she stole him; she herself has never stated what her motives were for removing him from the ship). The other was taking part in the murder of CSM, which, given her imprisonment at his hands, was wrong yet understandable. Then, of course, there's a very personal dimension for me: as someone who has been held prisoner, I have great empathy for Marita as a woman who was held hostage, but who at a fundamental level is not a victim, but a survivor. I think Laurie Holden gets nowhere near enough credit for her work on The X-Files - I see her portrayal of Marita in that situation as someone I can genuinely relate to as a fellow survivor.

Alex is a different ballgame. I wouldn't go right to "good" in describing Alex, but there are glimmers of a fundamental generosity and commitment in his personality. He embraces poverty (look at his prosthetic - mid-range at best) and a nomadic lifestyle to serve his own ideology, and that speaks to character. I believe he is patriotic - despite numerous betrayals, he has always ultimately brought technology and intelligence back to America - and, of course, he loves Marita. That's quite clear in his hurt in One Son and Requiem. He's well-spoken, bordering on poetic. So he's an interesting character, and he's become more so since Patient X and Two Fathers. And Marita obviously sees something in him, and I trust her judgment in a way I don't think I trust any of the other characters, except maybe Deep Throat.

The funny thing is that, despite those factors, that interest, I probably wouldn't have pursued the pairing if not for the almost all-pervasive misinterpretation of these characters (IMO) in fanfic. Marita is portrayed as a sultry vamp, and I just don't get that. She wears Peter Pan collars (Patient X) and v-neck pyjamas (Tunguska), for heaven's sake. She's portrayed as pursuing Mulder; but my interpretation of Tunguska, Teliko and One Son is that she's actually a little afraid of him. She strikes me as being quite afraid of most men - WMM in Patient X; CSM in Requiem - and is really only at ease with harmless Jeffrey, and of course Alex, who - while resorting to violence to achieve an end - is not an inherently violent character. (He doesn't fight back when the chronically uncontrollable Mulder punches him out, for instance. He controls himself. These are not the actions of an aggressive man). She has only ever been portrayed in any kind of romantic setting with Alex, and that wasn't a fling - he was apparently at her side in Zero Sum and possibly even in Tunguska, if you look at the finer details of those episodes very carefully. So I never understood the bitchy sultry seductress thing people seemed to write for her.

When we look to Alex, the fanfic situation is even worse - he sleeps with everything that moves, speaks roughly, has a rat's instincts but no smarts. He fucks Marita for sport and hurts her for the same reason. Again, none of this is borne out on the show. Canonically, he is well-spoken, and apparently well-educated. He has been linked only to Marita, whom he clearly loves or loved. The more I read, the more frustrated I got, because I just couldn't see the Nick Lea/Laurie Holden characters in the fic I read. At that point, the only decent Krycek/Marita stories I'd read were Maybe Marigolds and Acaulescent, by Miss Elise - two of the most moving XF pieces I've ever read.

Finally, as writers tend to do when they meet with this kind of frustration, I decided to write one myself - just to see if it could be done better. I wrote a short, half-assed piece with a few really good scenes - the original Not My Lover, which was only supposed to be maybe 20 pages long. Then I stuck it on a data CD and forgot about it, until Requiem. There were some fascinating dynamics in that episode (the protectiveness Alex had for Marita when they were with CSM was really intriguing) and they inspired me to dig it out again and give it some serious treatment. The next thing I knew, I was living and breathing Not My Lover, and falling head-over-heels in love with the characters and whatever was between them. I found out later that a handful of people did write good Krycek/Marita, but by then there was no stopping me *g*.

As far as community reaction goes - I'm used to bad or non-reaction. I was only about the third serious Scully/Skinner author back in 1996, behind Sally Bradstreet. Now, of course, that pairing is almost respectable; but there was nothing then. No lists, no maintained archives. A very small readership. You were considered very odd for even writing it. And that's basically what happened again when I moved into Krycek/Marita. I have noticed the drop in recommendations at Ephemeral and the drop in feedback, and to be honest I didn't anticipate how dramatic that would be. I think I thought that Krycek had a following, therefore my work would have a following - I didn't realise just how strongly slash-orientated the Krycek fandom really was. What feedback I got was amazing - so very appreciative and lovely - and I cherished every word... but I noticed the difference. I got very disheartened for a while.

That all changed late last year, a couple of months after I finished Not My Lover, because of three separate events. The first was, of course, the Spookys, in which Not My Lover made the top three for Outstanding Other Series Character Romance, and - to my surprise - Outstanding Krycek Characterisation. I thought I might get Outstanding Other Series Character Characterisation - for Marita - but I never dreamed I'd get Krycek, simply because of that slash-focus of the Krycek niche. So that made me realise that recs and feedback didn't necessarily indicate in this niche, in the same way they had in Scully/Skinner.

The second thing was when I looked at the server statistics on Blondie's Ratcave. I honestly didn't think anyone much went there. I made it primarily because it was something *I* wanted. I make it a policy not to put guestbooks on my sites - I think a website is for your visitors, not for your personal edification - and I didn't have a counter at that stage either, so I had no idea how many hits I was getting. It turned out to be nearly 500 unique visitors a week. For a niche as obscure as this one, that was mindblowing. So those two things were major morale boosters, and I got back a lot of my enthusiasm.

The third thing is not quite fic related, but it's still related to the niche. I joined xdesign, a fabulous group of online X-Files artists, and I've made many Krycek-Marita artworks - I'm up to about 30 now, I think - and I got a lot of appreciation there. One great thing about digital art is that people will look at it, even if it isn't their own preferred genre, because it only takes a moment. There's not the time investment of reading fiction. So I got a lot of positive feedback on the graphic work I was doing with the duo. That fed into my enthusiasm for writing fiction.

In more recent times, there has been a new development that has also increased my sense of my work having an impact, and this has meant a great deal to me. I have been sending a lot of feedback to people about their Krycek/Marita stories, because I'm really trying to encourage the genre. In fact, I've sponsored a Krycek/Marita category in this year's Spookys with about $100 (US) worth of prizes, as part of the Ratcave's ongoing commitment to encouraging Krycek/Marita creativity (we've also run a multimedia competition with some great entries). Anyway, quite a few of the authors have written back crediting reading Not My Lover as inspiring their interest in the genre. To have that kind of chain reaction - and I don't take all or even most of the credit; fundamentally it comes down to the portrayal of the characters by Holden and Lea - but to even be a catalyst in it has a significance I can't even describe. I think everyone wants to inspire somebody, creatively, romantically, spiritually, whatever; to effect change in people - and especially the incredibly talented people who are coming out of the woodwork and lending their hand to Krycek/Marita work lately... it's something you can't put a price on. We all want to believe we leave this life with some beauty, I think, and to have even been a signpost in that... it means a lot. That all sounds very heady for hobby writing, but I think people sell fanfic short. Look at Leyla Harrison, who passed away recently. So many of us had hours of beauty in our lives from reading her work. That counts for a hell of a lot, as legacies go; and that's before we even consider the other work she did outside fanfic on the causes that were important to her.

MEGAN: It seems like a lot of Krycek-oriented writers like him because there is so much room for invention, because after so many years we can only guess at what's going on in his head and in his life, really. And it's nearly the same with Marita - how much creation do you do when you write Krycek and Marita? Are there Krycek or Marita portrayals in stories that you have enjoyed?

DESLEA: I employ much more creation with Marita than Krycek. Marita really is a shadowy figure. We know how she dresses and where she lives and works, but that's about all. She has never discussed herself, her agenda, her beliefs, or anything else besides facts - not even in the extremity of her condition at Fort Marlene. Alex, on the other hand, is almost an open book to me. He deals in lies, that's true; but he also speaks of concepts. Truth, loyalty, sacrifice, the past, the future, responsibility - he's spoken of all of these. We don't know what goes on in his head, but we do have a context for how he thinks... the processes he uses; the values he places high in his deliberations. For me - again, as a philosopher - that's enough to make a framework for who he is at a basic level of thought. And that in turn is enough to shed light on motivations and agendas. I employ little pure creation in my depiction of Alex. Most of my depiction of Alex is (to me, and to my training) implicit in the person we've seen onscreen. There is some pure creation, of course; but not a lot.

Marita is a different ballgame. I think there is a lot of scope for invention there. I've written Marita as a mother, as a wife, as a widow; as a powerbroker and as a stooge; as weak and as strong. I have always written her, however, as someone with a strong underlying values base; because I perceive that in her character, as I have said elsewhere in our discussions.

I have enjoyed depictions of both characters in other people's fiction. I adore Kassandra's depictions of Krycek. Now, I have to say right off the bat that the Krycek/Mulder pairing offends me. Krycek apparently killed Mulder's father, and as someone who has lost a father violently, I just can't mentally accommodate that, generally speaking. However, Shock The Monkey is one of the fics on my hard drive that I read the most. In a lot of ways, her Krycek inspired mine.

There are other people who write exceptionally good Krycek and Marita, both as a couple and as individual characters. Rachel Anton springs to mind. Her Krycek and Marita have many of the traits I identified earlier as - in my perception - inaccurate or inauthentic; and yet I consider Rachel's work to be among the best Krycek and Marita characterisations out there. Which just goes to show that any fanfic boundary (canonical or personal) can be breached, if it's written well enough. Rachel loves the characters, she gives them history and motivation and a lot of genuine empathy, and so she can write them in a way I would never write them and still have me longing for more.

MEGAN: What did you find appealing about the Scully/Skinner pairing? Are you ever tempted to do the MSR thing because those are the stories that seem like they get all the attention?

DESLEA: I did play with a couple of MSR pieces. Back in Season 3, I used to quite like reading "shippy" romance - even now, Shalimar's classic "Playing Goddess" is one of my favourite reads (probably the only MSR I still read), and I thought I'd try my hand at it. But MSR never came together for me as a medium. I have been involved with unstable men (and women, for that matter), and so I attach absolutely no romanticism to Mulder and his so-called "passion" and "relentlessness". Mulder is a character who I love rather like you love a wounded puppy dog, but he is someone I would never get involved with, and someone I would never want anyone I loved involved with - which is why I could never put him together with Scully successfully. What it came down to was, I loved Scully and I wanted to see her with a good, stable, solid, grounded, honourable man. Mulder didn't fit the bill. Skinner did.

For me, a pairing almost always comes down to my love for a character, and the kind of future I want for that character. I stunned a group of people a while back by saying I probably wouldn't get involved with Skinner, though I can see his appeal... they had assumed my Scully/Skinner pairing reflected who and what I wanted in a partner. It didn't. It reflected my love for Scully and wanting to see her with the right kind of man. Kind of like a sisterly thing. Similarly, I would never get involved with Krycek - though I might get involved with Marita - but I have a real love for Krycek, and Krycek loves Marita, so I want him to have her (and vice versa). Interestingly, if I were writing romance for Mulder's benefit, it would probably be with Diana - because whatever soul mate thing he has with Scully, he loves Diana; and that love is a simpler, less protective, less guilt-ridden thing than his love for Scully. It is an essentially healthier love. I've never disputed the shipper claim of a love connection between Scully and Mulder, but I don't see it as a primarily romantic love. It's a very complicated tangled thing caught up with insularity and paternalism and guilt and a host of things; mostly unhealthy things. And even if it has a sexual component - as any friendship between heterosexual males and females has - that doesn't necessarily make them a couple, or a healthy couple.

I have to admit that I have a lot of issues with the shipper end of the fandom. Some of my best friends are shippers, as the saying goes; but I've gotten awful letters from shippers, especially during my Scully/Skinner days (and the Dipper writers I know now are getting even worse than I did). I would never have dreamed of criticising anyone for writing Mulder/Scully - though I do have a couple of friends I do keep asking to come over to the dark side *g* - but that courtesy has often not been extended back to me. Many of them seem very threatened by noromo fiction, and that puzzles me. I don't generally like reading MSR, or Krycek/Mulder, or many of the other pairings; but the existence of those writers and those works of fiction doesn't threaten me as a writer or a fan or a person. So I don't get that weird insecurity and rivalry that seems to exist. I have read interviews with shipper authors who basically have said, in only slightly nicer words, that you'd have to be pretty stupid not to buy into the MSR ship now; and as I've indicated above, I don't actually think that's the case. There is scope for the shipper POV - there always has been - but it's far from the only scope. To view the fanfic universe as MSR except for the odd aberrant few seems to me very shortsighted; worse, it's condescending and rude.

I guess the other thing I don't like from a handful of shipper writers (and I stress, a handful) - this is partly pique, I suppose - is their abuse of the Krycek/Marita pairing. I've read awful, awful stories in which Mulder and Scully's pure-as-the-driven-snow lovemaking is contrasted with Krycek and Marita's sado-masochistic orgies. The author is clearly trying to make a point about good people versus evil people, but it seems rather petty and shallow to me. Bad people love, just like good people. And good people have down and dirty sex, just like bad people. I just don't understand why anyone would think that was a compelling contrast. Imagery like that strikes me as a pot-shot - a cheap nasty insult to characters the writer doesn't particularly like. It's a bit like the stories which make unashamedly irrelevant quips about Diana giving CSM blowjobs, or which depict Scully telling her inner nun to shove off before diving into an orgy. It's petty. There's too much pettiness in the world, without doing it in our storytelling, too.

So I do have some hostility towards the shipper niche. Hostility might not be the right word - I suppose I mean something reactionary rather than hostile. That's not fair, and I realise that. As I said, some of my best friends are shippers, and I realise that to some extent I'm tarring a whole niche with the behaviour of a few. I also realise that noromos behave badly too. But I really do think that some shippers have abused their majority status, and that many really prominent and respected shippers have abused their status to denigrate people working in other niches of the fandom.

I think there's a cultural problem, as well. Here in Australia, we don't have "rights" as that term is understood in the States. We have responsibilities. Our rights are those implied in other people's responsibilities to us. So when I write publicly, I think, not about my right to say it, but whether I have a responsibility to anyone to not say it, or to say it more sensitively. And I don't think enough people think that way. That's not to say I've never spoken inappropriately in the public forum, but on the handful of occasions I have, it's been from emotion, not from self-absorption. It's unfortunate, but it happens to all of us. But there are too many people who do it routinely, who don't even perceive that there's anything wrong with that.

MEGAN: You're also sponsoring an award in the Spookies, which is quite unusual. How did that come about? How important do you think the various awards for fanfiction are?

DESLEA: I became aware of the importance of Blondie's Ratcave as the major Krycek/Marita page, and the only comprehensive fiction archive. It's very hard to find Krycek/Marita fiction - it is out there, but there's no standard acronym. Marita doesn't even have a Gossamer letter designation. Some of it is archived as Krycek/Marita, some as K/O, some as K/Ma, some as Krycek/Covarrubias. So the Ratcave is really the only way of finding most of what's out there (I've probably missed some) without spending many hours at the archives and on the search engines, as I have done. And as I started writing to people for archive permissions, and getting notes back from people who thought they were the only ones writing it, I realised there was a whole visibility problem which was getting in the way of K/Ma authors. It was actually preventing us from networking in the way Shippers and Slashers network, and creativity in a vacuum is never as powerful as creativity in context. So that was when I decided to put some effort into encouraging K/Ma creativity and visibility. We've run multimedia competitions, and given away hardware and software to people who make artworks and music videos for us. Sometimes we send our feedback on e-cards. We have so much in the way of video and artwork, especially - and it's because we ask for it and we encourage it and we reward for it. What we have is amazing for such a niche pocket of the fandom. I'm starting a new program now called the Commissioned Author's Program, where I ask a specific person to write something - rather like a one-to-one challenge - and those stories get a special place on the website. These sorts of things keep people's interest fresh and dynamic, and they really help the creativity to flow.

Needless to say, one of the first things I considered was awards. I started out with Blondie's Choice, which was basically a recommendation I made on a personal level. That seemed to be too subjective, and it didn't invite visitor involvement. I did consider running our own awards, but to be really honest I wasn't certain about delineation of categories; and since I'm a prominent author who would probably be nominated, there were accountability issues, too. I also felt that an on-site award program was merely preaching to the converted. I wanted to attract readers and writers who hadn't considered K/Ma as a viable medium before, and get them thinking - hey, maybe this is worth reading/writing. And I'm not sure how credible niche awards are. Only regular site users know how the award was run - whether it was peer voted, or what accountability measures were in place - whereas everyone knows those things about the Spookys. One day, it hit me. Why not suggest Krycek/Marita as a Spooky category and somehow sponsor it under the Ratcave banner? So I wrote to Lauryn at the Spookys and suggested exactly that. There was no precedent for this at Spooky level, but there had been something similar in the Skinner Wirerims awards the previous year, and it had been quite successful; and Lauryn was receptive enough to write a policy which allowed for sponsored awards. From that, the Blondie's Ratcave Award for Outstanding Krycek/Marita Romance was born. I believe a couple of other specialist sites have sponsored other awards under that policy since then. I'm really excited about it. I don't think an award, on its own, is enough to kick-start creativity; but in context of everything else we're doing... I don't know, I suppose it's a statement, a unifying factor. It counts for a lot.

I think awards are a double-edged sword. You can take them too seriously, and there can be too many of them. We all love recognition, and we all love to get involved in recognizing each other, and those are good things, because they help the creativity cycle to keep on pumping. But they can get terribly competitive and political and destructive. People can be misguided... I remember in 1998 I asked a young friend to nominate me. I said that I couldn't settle on my best work - and I wrote a hell of a lot that year - and could she please nominate me where she thought was most appropriate. She sat at my computer one night and nominated everything I wrote in every category for which it was even remotely eligible. That year, the organisers were asking people to be very discreet in their nominations - there wasn't the "nominate yourself and preserve your eligibility" mindset of some of the other years - and they actually wrote to her/me and asked her to reconsider. She wouldn't back down. It was very messy and there was a lot of ill-feeling. So... people can be fiercely loyal and sometimes that manifests in unfortunate ways, and awards bring that out, I'm afraid.

I only really actively involve myself in the Spookys. My own approach to awards is that generally I nominate my better works in the first round to preserve my eligibility. In the first voting round, I write to my fic notification lists and my close friends and say, basically, "It's on... here's the URL, go take a look, and vote for me if you think I deserve it". Some of my fellow authors think that's awful; but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I've never asked anyone who hadn't read my work to vote for me, and I've never asked anyone to vote if they didn't think I deserved it. I don't press the issue beyond the first voting round, however. I take the view that, having asked people to vote in the first round, they can decide from there whether they feel strongly enough to vote in successive rounds. I think of those actions as acceptable strategic choices; but I think if you're still asking people to vote for you at the final stage, you're probably pushing it beyond fairness - not to mention alienating people. Bringing the awards and your participation in them to people's attention is okay, but anything beyond that is a little too political for my liking.

I don't really get involved in awards beyond the Spookys, but I think that an award has to have the recognition of the whole fandom, or a whole niche of it, to have much credibility. The Wirerims had credibility, for instance, because all the major Skinner fiction interests collaborated in organising them. Otherwise, where's the accountability? Where's the prestige? I've seen so-called award programs advertised on USENET with no URL, no information on the judging, and no information on the slant or niche of the award. There's no harm in subjective one-person or small-group "awards" (which are really recommendations, IMO) - as long as they don't pretend to be anything else.

In a similar vein, one thing which isn't related to fic, but which I will touch on, is the credibility of XF website awards. These really need culling. At the Ratcave, we only enter properly judged awards (of which there aren't many), because they help us to monitor service delivery. Most seem to be giveaway awards, or design awards from horribly designed websites that make you wonder if the award was an insult, or programs where you have to swap awards, or pad each other's guestbooks. These aren't awards - they're marketing ploys. There's a whole problem of integrity of association. This problem is probably much bigger, and much more ego-driven, than that of fanfic awards.

MEGAN: Do you enjoy getting feedback? Have you ever gotten a particularly memorable bit of feedback? Do you save comments on your stories?

DESLEA: I'm the original feedback slut. I love the stuff. I'm such an egotist. I have kept every single feedback everyone's ever sent me - even the one-liners - and they're all in a folder on my hard drive. I cherish every word of it. Three of the most memorable pieces lately related to Not My Lover and Hands. One said - and this echoes a lot of the feedback I get for K/Ma fic - that he absolutely despised the Marita character, but that he'd found that he'd developed real empathy for her in reading my work. Another, along similar lines, said "You make me like and respect Marita." I am really blown away by that sort of feedback - that I can take someone so deeply into a character they'd dismissed, that I have been able to convey some of what I see in a way that actually changes their perspective. I mean, it's an amazing thing to look at that and say, "Wow, I did that." A third - and I am so overdue on my thank you notes, for this one in particular - gave a really long rundown on all my K/Ma work and what she'd liked and why it was powerful for her. It must have taken so long to think out and get down. I was so touched that someone put that much time into writing to me. (Note to self... thank you notes after this...)

MEGAN: Have you ever written fic for other fandoms? Have you ever tried original fiction?

DESLEA: No to other fandoms. I have done other fandoms by way of crossover - Profiler, Teletubbies and Santa Barbara have all made guest appearances - but my fanfic stories, in adulthood, have all been set in the XF universe. I am playing a little with a Once A Thief piece featuring Vic Mansfield (Nick Lea's character) and The Director, but I don't know if it will go anywhere. In childhood, of course, I wrote Santa Barbara and Days of our Lives and The Colbys and God knows what else.

I have tried original fiction. I wrote an awful novel when I was sixteen - 400,000 words of it. That was mostly age, I think. The characterisation and description was actually quite good in some places (I even reworked a few scenes and used them in a fanfic a while back - and no, I'm not telling you which one), but the plot sucked.

MEGAN: Why not other fandoms? Have other shows simply never driven you to that fanfic place?

DESLEA: I don't watch enough television to write fanfic about other shows. I don't watch television at home at all (my TV isn't even connected to the outdoor antenna) and only a little at my grandmother's. I don't come home and turn on the TV. I turn on the computer. I'd rather be working on a webpage or a thesis or a fanfic. XF only keeps my attention because of its philosophical slant - it's an extension of my other intellectual endeavours.

MEGAN: How much XF fic do you read? Do you have favorite authors or stories?

DESLEA: Not as much as I'd like. The solution to that, of course, is that everyone should write Krycek/Marita fic *g*. Seriously - I will read anything Scully/Skinner by Xanthe or Lyrica, and anything Krycek/Marita by Rachel Anton and Vanzetti. I'll read anything by Perri Watson-Lamana, Kassandra, Cofax, or Mary Mastrangelo. Oh - and any humour whatsoever by Halrloprillar or Trajan. There are others, but those are the ones springing to mind. Now that I'm archiving K/Ma fic for the Ratcave, I'm looking at a lot more story headers on atxfc, and I'm reading more as a consequence. I'm quite taken with Doggett stories, but I doubt I'll be writing them any time soon. If I write in any other niches in the future, I expect they will be about Diana or Gibson. But I have a bank of Not My Lover storylines that should take me up to 2003, as well as two old Scully/Skinner fics that I really must finish.

MEGAN: How do you cope with writer's block?

DESLEA: I either write or engage with my writing. I write a letter, a shopping list, another story. I enact the problem scene, or read what I've already done on the story, or other writing I've done. I proofread. I make digital artworks based on the problem scene or chapter. Sometimes making an artwork which captures the feel of the problem chapter will break the block. I went through a terrible time with a recent chapter of my current WIP. Marita was very young and very lost, and my confusion and rather dazed blankness reflected hers (especially as I was writing her first-person). I made half a dozen artworks, most of which wouldn't "work"; and when one finally did, the writer's block eased as well. For me, art and writing are very closely intertwined.

MEGAN: Do you rewrite? Work with a beta, anything like that?

DESLEA: I do have a handful of people I will ask if I feel that a piece is particularly troublesome; but it's not the norm. I don't have a beta who routinely vets everything I write, besides myself. That approach is not without pitfalls - self-betaing means you do occasionally miss typos and missing words; you lose that objective voice. But ultimately I think it's important to be confident in our writing to a point where we can make a product and put it out there and know that it's a good piece of work. We can become so reliant on others that we lose sight of that. It's important for our growth as writers that we can identify problems and find solutions ourselves.

For me, the yardstick of whether something is ready to be out there is whether I enjoy reading it myself. Most of my work, I can sit there and read over and over again. It enthralls me. That sounds horribly egotistical, but what I mean is that I have read it and read it and read it and changed everything that bothered me about it, until I could enjoy it wholeheartedly. That's not that hard to accomplish, in one sense - every story I've written has been a story I've wanted to read - so the key has always been the execution. All my major works went through that before they ever saw the light of USENET. I've been writing a piece overnight, and I read it as a reader at least twenty times before posting it to the lists this morning. Obviously, badfic and short humour pieces don't get that much attention - but almost everything else does. One exception would be Searing Snow, which I wrote to a deadline (Christmas) because I had never seen a Krycek/Marita Christmas story. Big mistake. It's a nice little story, and there are high points; but every time I read it, I think, hmm, I wish I'd held off and done it more thoroughly. It's still on the agenda for revision, because I think it has the makings of a really good piece.

Although I don't use a beta in the conventional sense, I don't write entirely in a vacuum, either. I have a handful of people that I will discuss my writing with - Rachel Anton, Vanzetti, Kristen and Mary Mastrangelo spring to mind, and I guess there are a handful of others. So I won't necessarily say, "Could you look this over and tell me what you think?" - but I will say, "I'm having real problems finding Marita's voice in this one because..." So I do have people with whom I talk through the process of writing. In general, these are people with a lot in common with me, from a writing standpoint (and personally). For instance, Mary is Catholic and that's something that enormously impacts on how she writes and how she perceives her characters, as it does with me, and that's something we've been talking about for four or five years now. The common ground doesn't mean total agreement, by any means; but it's a frame of reference. It means we're speaking the same language.

I do beta for others, but very rarely. I'm a pain-in-the-butt beta - I pick over every paragraph like a vulture. I'm told I'm helpful, but it's stressful for me. I beta'd a short story for a friend last year - took it on holidays and spent most of a day on it. I didn't begrudge it by any means, but it's not something I'd do every day.

MEGAN: You've been a part of the online XF community for a while - what changes have you seen? What good things have happened, and what bad things have happened?

DESLEA: I think the fandom has gotten very insular and political. Back in '96, atxfc was really just about stories. The controversies happened, but they were rarer. I don't know - I mean people threw hissy fits even then, but they seem more common now, and they're nastier, too. One flame war I was involved in a year or so ago was about minors writing NC17 material. I'm pretty laid-back about that, actually, which is partly cultural - more on that issue later - but this flame war culminated with a person who is known for online unpleasantness saying, basically, that if I knowingly read NC17 fic written by a minor then I was a pedophile. I mean, that's pretty extreme stuff. For anyone, that's below the belt; and I'm a parent. I don't need anyone saying that about me in the public forum. What if I'd been in a custody battle at the time? That kind of reckless vitriol is just plain scary.

I think, too, that people have gotten a lot less generous in a number of ways. They send less feedback, less often. Readers won't break out of their preferred subgenres and try anything else the way they used to. There's more bandwidth stealing, and less co-operation between archivists. If someone asks for help on the newsgroup with a newbie question, no-one helps - people just jump on the ridicule bandwagon. Not long ago I was in an Ebay bidding war over a rare videotape of a movie staring an XF cast member. I wanted it to get video captures for my website. Well, I lost; but I recognised the winning bidder as a fellow webmaster. I wrote and asked if she'd dub me a copy at my expense. We move in the same circles but she didn't even have the decency to reply. A few years ago I wouldn't have even had to ask - the other webmaster would have offered. The website business has gotten competitive in some quite unfortunate ways. It serves no-one for us to be at each other's throats - after all, we're all in it for the same reason, aren't we?

I do think that webmasters and archivists are under a lot of pressure, and not only because it's a big job. The commercial pressures of finding reliable webspace are increasing, especially with the fall in internet stocks and NASDAQ's recognition that e-commerce isn't always good commerce. The gravy train has ground to a halt, and webmasters are faced with tough decisions if they want to provide good service delivery. I've moved several of my sites in the last year, especially the video ones. I finally gave up with Blondie's Ratcave and started paying for webspace, which is quite a lot for a 100MB website. I don't think there's enough recognition or support, and I don't think we're pulling together enough. And I don't think that our users really recognise what we go through, either. They think the Net is still pretty much a free lunch, and it just isn't. If you want more than 10MB of ftp-accessible webspace without handing over a license to your material, you really have to pay. That pressure comes from outside the fandom; but that then makes us less flexible in terms of what we do, and our users pick up on that. Then they get more demanding. Though fandom, itself, is still a communal endeavour, its statement and interaction is taking on very commercial overtones as a consequence of these pressures.

Above and beyond that... well, there's less quality fanfic. There are certain authors who post short stories nearly every day, and that sort of worries me, because it makes me think there's not the pride and care that used to be a hallmark of XF fanfic. I just don't see how you can output that much and maintain any quality, and on reading, in most cases they don't. Don't misread me - I'm hardly saying the old days were the Glory Days of quality fanfic. We've always had bad fiction and rushed fiction. But there seems to be more of it the last couple of years. Sites like The Wicked Witches and Godawful Fanfic probably wouldn't have had enough fodder three or four years ago to survive.

Another change is the massive increase in romance fic. There has always been a shipper dominance, and a romance dominance, and that's fine; but once that was firmly rooted in the XF universe as a whole, rather than just the pieces the author liked (like Scully's pregnancy). Almost everything I've ever written had romance in it, but they weren't romance stories. Even Not My Lover, in 50,000 words, had only two major love scenes. It wasn't a love story - it was a *life* story. And a few years ago, most romance fic was like that, always excluding PWP. Now, however, people's capacity to look into the canon and the mythology seems to have died. That was one downside to the death of the known Consortium figures in One Son. You can't really write Season 8 Consortium-fic without moving towards an alternative universe, because the only Consortium figures left are Krycek and Marita.

I think Scully's pregnancy was a major error in judgment on the part of the powers that be. I think it may have been an attempt to salvage the mytharc, but all they've succeeded in doing is making the XF universe about Scully and her munchkin in the minds and hearts of the fans. For a show built, as I've said elsewhere, on a whole eschatology, that's a grave error - especially a show which only has a contracted Scully presence for two more years. Don't misread me, it's a powerful thing *in theory*. I write babyfic, of sorts; and as a parent and as a Catholic I find the whole procreative element of human love very meaningful and very compelling, when written the right way. But TV is different to the written word. That kind of symbolic power can't be conveyed as it is in writing; and more importantly, people don't view TV with that kind of receptivity as they do writing. Chris Carter is a thinker, and he thinks like a writer, not like a viewer. And on this occasion that has led him down a dangerous path. That path has had major implications for the fandom and how it understands the show, its fic, and itself. The fandom is evolving, and I hope that evolution will eventually be for the better; but in the meantime, it's a painful adolescence.

It hasn't all been bad. That's one problem with asking an old timer about the past verses the present - they tell you all their disappointments and none of the improvements! But there have been good developments as well. The minority working outside MSR are uniting - not as well as they once might have, but enough to share audiences and insights. It used to be Shippers, Slashers, and everyone else - but now the other minorities are finding one another. Skippers, Krycek/Marita shippers, Scully/Skinner shippers, Lone Gunficcers... they've all got lists and major archives. This is a good move for diversity. Another really, really positive thing is the explosion of non-literary XF creativity. Artwork, music videos, flash games - you name it. That draws people together and feeds the creativity cycle, especially since these endeavours are generally more co-operative, and less competitive than fanfic. There has also been a surge in XF-based philanthropy - there's OBSSE's Scully Marathons and The Nick League and all sorts of charitable works done at both widespread and domestic levels in the name of the show and the performers. There's more responsibility, in some ways - a voluntary winding back on unauthorised pictures of Piper Anderson, the reduction in actorfic, things like that. So - I don't view the fandom with pessimism, but we have a long way to go.

MEGAN: You've written some NC17 level stories. How do you feel about having those out there on the 'net? Do you worry about underage kids reading them?

DESLEA: I stand by everything I've written. I'm one of comparatively few NC17 fanfic writers out there using my real name, with the full knowledge of those around me. My grandmother has read my NC17 fic. My *priest* has read it. There are lots of things I've written that I would write differently now; but there is nothing I would be ashamed to be associated with. I have written explicit sex, but I have never written meaningless sex. Even the most disturbing sex scene I wrote - Someone I Trusted I, which was actually pretty exploitative - was laden with meaning. The wrong kinds, certainly - but that in itself was a story; and Someone I Trusted II was the redeeming counterpart. That said, there is always the potential issue of people I don't know, and employment... but we're very laid-back about sex in my country. I would be very surprised if it was an issue in any but the most conservative of workplaces... and I wouldn't be likely to seek (or obtain) work in that sort of environment anyway. It's all been out there for five years already, and it's never been an issue yet.

I must confess, I don't entirely understand people's reticence about revealing themselves as fanfic writers or sex writers. There are circumstances, of course - the slash writer from a homophobic family; the NC17 writer from a conservative Islamic family; the teenager still relying on parents for support... but everyday people living with other everyday people - I don't understand that. Why write something if you're not going to be proud enough of it to put your name to it? I don't think it's any coincidence that many of the very best writers are ones who use real names - Rachel Anton, Mary Mastrangelo, the late Leyla Harrison, for instance. That's not to say pen names don't also rate among the top writers - Xanthe would be one - but named ones would probably dominate the list.

Since the main part of this interview, there has been a discussion on this issue on the fanfic list Glass Onion. It became clear to me that to some extent my cultural situation has freed me to be open about my NC17 fanfic in a way that many people are not free. In Australia, we don't put a lot of taboos around sex (straight or not). That's not to say we don't have conservatives and homophobes in our midst, we certainly do; but no-one much would think badly of anyone else for writing sexually explicit material. For us, sex is just another part of life. The fact of writing NC17 fanfic could be a nine-day-wonder drawing a few smirks in some situations, but it would not arise in the context of blackmail or custody or any of the things people mentioned in that discussion. I suppose fundamentally I don't care that much what people think of me; and because I live in a country where there aren't a lot of social consequences of what I do, I have the luxury to not care. Also, since I'm a published writer, even the unpublished writing I do is probably seen with a different legitimacy to that of someone to whom writing is "just a hobby". And a lot of my academic work in ethics has been on sexuality and gender issues. I suppose, when I really look at it, there are a lot of things in my situation that justify, or contextualise my fic; and that makes a difference. I don't think I realised to what extent those factors had defined or enabled or empowered me to be out as a fic writer.

I can't say that I worry about underage kids reading my fic. The sex taboo is very much a North American construct, not often found in other Western countries. Kids study texts with contextualised sex in high school here. One of my classmates wrote a very sensible little tract about sex in second grade, and the teacher didn't bat an eyelid. That a pre-teen might stumble across sex in my fic is just not a concern to me because in my part of the world that's just not seen as a bad thing. I suppose I might feel differently if I were writing BDSM - I think BDSM really is an adult concept, because it requires quite a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of love, trust and power - but not the vanilla stuff I write. But even then, I wouldn't see BDSM as something that would damage a minor - at worst, it might go over her or his head.

A lot of the ratings business we indulge in in fanfic is pretty meaningless, IMO. Movie and television ratings are totally inappropriate for literary use, which is why the book industry doesn't use them. They're also based on American standards, which is completely inappropriate in a multinational environment. In Australia we had openly gay and lesbian characters on prime time television in the early 1970s. So you can imagine how offensive it is to me to have to rate the slightest hint of slash UST as an automatic NC17 because a bunch of people half a world away feel it's an adult concept. I do use the ratings as a gesture of courtesy to those who want them, but frankly, I think it's a load of nonsense. In the real world, there are no warnings on novels that have sex in them. You buy them and read them, and if there happens to be a sex scene in there and you don't go for that sort of thing, you skim over a couple of pages. That seems perfectly sensible to me.

I have considered making available PG-13 versions of my fic, mostly as a gesture of courtesy to those kids out there who are confining themselves to that level of fic, at the request of their parents. Notwithstanding that I wouldn't ask that of my own child, I would still like to encourage that kind of respect by making my fic available to them at PG level. It's not an easy thing to do, because there are instances where the sex really is important. I don't think I've ever written a love scene that didn't convey something important about the characters and the story; but most of them, I'll concede, could have been written in other, non-sexual ways - the trick is finding them. One I would really hesitate about is a scene in Not My Lover - it deals with the first time Alex and Marita make love after the loss of his arm. It's a pivotal moment to do with Alex's healing - this very intimate experience that he is still a man, he still has his wife and his life. That he can't hold Mare in the same way, but he can still love her, that they can find ways. It's crucial. It's the one love scene I've written that I honestly don't believe I could edit without really significantly damaging the characters, their marriage, and the story.

When I came on the fanfic scene in '96, I was twenty-one. I had very little experience in writing sex and even less at having it. I found that not being able to write sex was a huge barrier to my ability to convey love - in retrospect it wasn't the sex itself, but the emotional layers that went with it, that I was unskilled at. I'm not saying that's true of everyone - it probably wouldn't have been for someone with more social or dating experience (I'd only ever dated the one person) - but it was for me. So I set out to break that deadlock by writing the most explicit sex that I could. That decision was the foundation of the Someone I Trusted series. Each story, until number 10, had an explicit sex scene between Scully and Skinner with a theme - forgiveness, betrayal, grief, whatever - and a self-contained story built around that theme. Those stories in turn made up a bigger story. It wasn't a bad series (I still have a couple of parts to go; it's on hold for now) and I certainly grew a lot while writing it. As I explored this kind of writing and got the development I was aiming for, my need to write it decreased; and now - while I do write reasonably detailed sex - it isn't really explicit, Insert Tab A Into Slot B sex anymore. I can't think of the last time I actually identified genitalia in a written sex scene - it would be at least two years. What I write now is - I don't like to say euphemistic, because that makes people think of "throbbing members" and "caverns of love" - but it's more earthy. It's not about people doing "things" to each other; it's about people being with one another. I'm not expressing myself very well, so a quote might demonstrate better what I mean:

"I held up my hand to her, and when she took it, I pulled her down to straddle me. The floorboards were hard and cold against my back, but I was heedless, drunk on her, craving her like an addict. I wanted to fill her in every way, to make her forever mine, because I was hers. We rolled around the floor like animals in heat, knocking furnishings and our belongings about carelessly; yet what I felt for her then was not primal, but spiritual. It was that gift of God, of soul meeting soul. I cradled her head with my arm - the only time I truly grieved the absence of its mate - and I worshipped her." - Not My Lover Chapter 3

It's a lot easier to write this sort of sex from a first-person POV. Narrators write about what's important to them, and when you make love with someone who means something to you, don't notice what they do so much as the fact that it's the one you love who's doing it. Mare could never mean as much to me, the fly-on-the-wall narrator, as she does to Alexi in the piece above; and so I don't think I could write that scene anywhere near as powerfully from an external narrator's POV as from his. Sex is probably the one area where third-person narration really doesn't stand up to the opposition. Third-person POV narration inevitably reduces sex to a physical act, no matter how we try to capture the emotional depth involved, because there's an essential element of perspective which transforms sex to lovemaking. When we have sex, we feel what the other does to us; but when we make love, we feel what *we* do to *them* - we revere them by giving to them. And you just can't capture that perspective shift very well in the third person.

MEGAN: If memory serves, you've stopped posting stories on Yahoogroups-based email lists, choosing instead to post a link to new stories. Do you want to talk a little about why that is?

DESLEA: That's correct. Badfic and other less significant works I still post occasionally; but for more serious works I use links. This is because of some ambiguities in Section 7 of the Yahoo Terms Of Service. At the time of writing, the clause relating to text content on publicly accessible areas of Yahoo claims an irrevocable license to the use or sale of that content as it sees fit. Whether that includes text sent to lists is unclear - the clause excludes it, but the definitions below the clause appear to include at least those Groups with publicly accessible archives; and what exactly distinguishes the Groups from the rest of the service isn't defined. On at least two possible readings of that section, Yahoo has an irrevocable license to publish, sell, or sublicense the text you send to some lists for any reason at any time without your consent. Now, it's not that likely that those licenses will ever be used, but it *is* possible. There are circumstances in which they could do so without legal consequences and make a profit from doing so (and I can elaborate on these if you like). There are even some circumstances in which they might be *obliged* to do so, such as in the event of bankruptcy and a forced realisation of assets - which, given Yahoo's stock performance, is not impossible.

My refusal to be associated with this is partly conscientious objection. I agree that free online services are entitled to ask for something in exchange for the facilities they provide, but a license to use your work without your consent and without any remuneration is totally disproportionate. People are being taken advantage of, and at the moment most people think that's okay because the licenses haven't been abused... but if they are abused down the track, it will be too late, because the licenses are irrevocable. These companies respond to concerns with reassurances like, "Our policy is that we will only use this clause for the purpose of [X]" - never mind that those policies are not legally binding and could actually be forcibly overturned in the event of a merger or bankruptcy. If they were really serious about only using these clauses for [X], they would add [X] to the clause. In the event of mergers, these companies won't even tell you what date you become subject to the new terms of service. These are not behaviours of trustworthy commercial entities, if there even is such a thing. I'm not a conspiracy theorist; but when a company or an industry behaves as flagrantly inappropriately as this, you have to wonder.

Conscientious objection aside, my actions are also partly protecting my financial interests. I may well rework some of my fic as original fiction. I work in freelance writing now, but I probably will move into original fic in the next couple of years; and to have those sorts of licenses out there could really compromise the commercial value of any saleable work I derived from my fic. It's also protectiveness, with a touch of pique. I trust my 82-year-old grandmother more than anyone, but I wouldn't sign away the rights to my writing to her. So why on earth would I sign them over to a conglomerate half a world away that I find fundamentally untrustworthy?

MEGAN: Is there anything else you'd like to add? Anything I should have asked and missed?

DESLEA: I don't know that you "missed" anything, but a couple of things occurred to me while I was writing. There are a lot of things which people speak of as somehow indicating a poor writer, or a poor piece of writing. But poor writing is more than anything a matter of execution. One thing that occurs to me is the deux ex machina - the coincidence at the penultimate moment. This will earn criticisms every time. But have you noticed they happen in real life *all* the time? I think their use in fic is perfectly valid. The deux ex machina is not a sin. What can make it a sin is if it is done as a cure-all. A good deux ex machina brings about growth and change in our characters, and how they perceive their situation or the world. A bad deux ex machina makes the storyline resolve itself (thereby making itself redundant) while the protagonists look on, unchanged. Cliches like the long-lost identical twin and the return from the dead fall into the same sort of category - if done well, they are perfectly legitimate plot devices. Even the Mary Sue - yes, even Mary Sue can be legitimate.

Let me wait a bit while you get the colour back in your cheeks, there's a girl *g*. Yes, you heard me right. Even the Mary Sue can be a good thing. Why? Because Mary Sue is the personification of all the personal strengths that we bring to bear when we interpret our characters and attempt to make sense of their world. When we say that the Mary Sue is inherently bad, we really say that we as writers have no place in the world we live with our characters, and that's patently false. A bad Mary Sue is no different to any other bad character. She is one dimensional and unrealistic. A good Mary Sue, like any other good character, is complex, imperfect, and richly human. In retrospect, Susannah Skinner from Someone I Trusted was a Mary Sue - in fact, I'd even say that my Alex is a Mary Sue in some respects - but I don't think they're bad characters or that they're portrayed in bad ways. They're two of my most-complimented characterisations, actually. Mary Sue-ism, like everything else, comes down to execution. If you have a little self-insight and a little humility, you can project yourself into your characters without taking their basic humanity. And you can bring something rich to them, as well.

MEGAN: I was intrigued by what you said about Mary Sues. Do you think it's a trap to automatically think Original Character = Mary Sue?

DESLEA: Definitely. There are some fascinating original characters out there. When I think of my own OCs - the main ones being Susannah Skinner, Cynthia Mulder and Larissa Covarrubias - none of them are Mary Sues in the derogatory sense. However, Susannah and Larissa are both Catholic, like me; Susannah had a bad childhood, like me; Larissa faced parenthood under traumatic circumstances, like me. There is projection there, and I don't go to any real lengths to conceal that. However, they most certainly are not me. Susannah is probably a better person than I; and Larissa far, far worse. And both - along with Cynthia - are inherently flawed people. They are characters who drive the storylines at certain points, but they are not fairy godmothers who are catalysts every time one's needed. They have their own existences beyond their X-Files universe. Susannah isn't just Scully's stepdaughter; she is also a student, she has a girlfriend and a past and a life of her own. Those things aren't focal (because they aren't my story), but they are there - there's an implicit message that this character does not only exist as a prop in the Scully/Skinner drama of Someone I Trusted. Larissa has her own history, her own pain, her own good and evil, her own tragedy. In the chapters I'm working on now, she's evolving from Marita's nasty mother into a rounded person. Cynthia is a little different - she exists only for the XF universe - but that's sort of the point: as a clone, she has no grounding, no underlying basis for her humanity - that's the heart of her displacement. And the feedback I've gotten is that these characters have been perceived as strong supportive influences on the stories I've told.

But I think the key word here is supportive. They support the story - they don't drive it, and they don't live solely for it. Michael Ende, the author of Neverending Story, finished many a chapter, "[X] went on to her own adventures and did many amazing things, but that is a another story and will be told another time." If you can't say that about your OC's departure - if there's no sense that a character has a context beyond the story - then it's a bad OC, and people will think it a Mary Sue even if that isn't really the case.

I do sympathise with people who steer clear of original characters, but I think it's important to look on a piece's own merits rather than dismissing out of hand. I will happily read work with strong supporting OCs, but I admit I rarely read work in which a primary character - especially a romantic lead - is an OC. No particular reason; I'd just rather read Krycek/Marita or Scully/Skinner; and there's not enough time to read all the good fic as it is. And there are times when you do intuit that a romantic lead OC is a Mary Sue, and that can make reading it (especially the sex) a little voyeuristic and creepy.

MEGAN: You also had a line in there about Alex being a Mary Sue. I read somewhere once that the Mary Sue aspect of Krycek is one of the appeals of writing about him. Do you think this is the case? Why or why not? Do you see Mary Sue Krycek in some story portrayals of him?

DESLEA: I read the same quote and I must confess I didn't really understand what the writer meant. For me, the Mary Sue-ism in my Krycek is that he thinks the way I think. He believes different things, but he has the same logic, the same processes. But that's probably true of most characters since none of us can step entirely outside how we think to explore how other people think. What I think may have been meant was that Krycek breaks all the rules, answers to no-one; and I guess there's a little part of each of us that wishes we could live that way, too. Writing him can make a space for that little part. Yes, I suppose that's an appealing aspect to it.

I do think there is a lot of Mary Sue-ism in Krycek writing. More on the slash side than the het side, perhaps. There are a lot of slashy Kryceks (and quite a few het ones) where I've thought, "His name is Krycek and he's in leather and all, but it's not him." I think it is harder to write a plausible gay Krycek than a het one, because he is het (or arguably bi) onscreen. I'm not saying it's impossible - I've read very good Krycek slash - but it is harder because inevitably every sexual depiction will be seen - consciously or not - through the lens of his one onscreen statement of sexuality, and that was with a woman. That's always the challenge of breaching the onscreen sexual boundaries of a character. Saying, yes, I know what you saw with her, but that doesn't preclude this with him, and making it believable. Also - and this is just personal ick factor speaking - slash writers have this habit of having him call his squeeze "Baby" or "Sweetheart" or "Honey". I can't even imagine Krycek calling a *woman* any of these, unless he couldn't remember her name. That sort of gratuitous sentiment just doesn't sit right to me. Whenever I read Krycek call anyone any of these names, I instantly come out of the story and feel like I've gotten a peek at the writer's fantasy, and that makes me go "ewww".

None of which exactly answers your question, but anyway... *g*

I also wanted to talk a bit about the particular challenges of portraying Alex as an amputee. Is there anything specific you'd like to ask me on the subject?

MEGAN: I don't have anything too specific. Are there pitfalls? Did you do research? What tips do you have to share?

DESLEA: I suppose for me, writing Alex as an amputee is a political decision. So many writers (particularly Mulder/Krycek writers, I've noticed) seem to have him grow his arm back by some sci-fi intervention, or he has a super-prosthesis which is almost like a real arm, or whatever. That trend worries me. It seems to me there's this whole fear of the imperfect, of the damaged, of the scarred; and there are issues arising from that about visibility and respect for those people who really are amputees.

That said, a discussion on RATales recently had a comment from someone who said, basically, that by insisting we keep Alex as an amputee in our fic we're demonstrating the reverse - a fear of the perfect and the whole. That was an intriguing statement, but ultimately I don't agree. Post-Terma Alex is not whole (in any sense of the term). He is missing something very important and very intimate. He can't touch other people in the same way, which to my mind is much more fundamental than issues about cutlery or handwriting or whatever. And when we write him as whole, when we omit that loss and its implications, we miss about 80% of who Alex has become - not to mention making people who have suffered that loss invisible, yet again. On the show, Alex is actually a wonderful character in visibility terms. He's an amputee who has a love life and a work life and isn't defined by that loss and isn't unrealistically "good" or "touching". He's just a regular guy with his own personality and his own stuff, who happens also to be an amputee. Yet we ficcers persist in pulling that good work down because it's uncomfortable for us. I have read a couple of very good two-armed Krycek stories, but I'll be honest, they bother me. Scully-fertility-recovery stories, though I have written them myself, are starting to bother me for the same sorts of reasons.

As with everything, there are exceptions. In Kassandra's Shock The Monkey, Alex's physical weakness in the aftermath of regrowing his arm was interesting - it was related to the energy used by his body in regenerating the cell mass. In Vanzetti's Traders In Snow, we see Alex with two arms after a deal with the aliens; but he continues to carry himself and perform day-to-day tasks as though he has only one hand. These are good accounts of Alex readjusting to having two arms. And while I still have some political unease, I can look at those stories and see a good exploration of Alex's context as someone who has been an amputee, even if the author chooses not to have him as an amputee in the here and now. As I've said elsewhere in our discussions - almost any boundary can be broken if it's done well.

For myself, my current work-in-progress is set in Season 2, and it's the first time I've written Alex with two arms. I'm finding it surprisingly difficult. I keep mentally accommodating his loss in terms of how he positions himself, how he goes about things. More than once I've caught myself using phrases like, "I drew her into the cradle of my arm" when pre-Terma Alex would have said, "I drew her into my arms". I keep using "hand" and "arm" in the singular, because after a year of discipline and careful self-betaing, it's become automatic.

I did do research, and the outcome of it surprised me in some ways. I approached some people on an amputee newsgroup, for one thing. I don't think I was particularly clumsy or voyeuristic about it, but I was met with a lot of criticism and vitriol. I was very hurt and confused after that. However, one woman - an amazing Canadian police officer who lost an arm in the line of duty - did write to me very helpfully, and she shed some light on that. She said that upper-limb (arm) amputees never really seem to recover the way other amputees do. They're still touchy and angry long after leg/finger/whatever amputees have moved on. The raw grief doesn't seem to abate (and certainly that was my experience in how I was treated). That makes a lot of sense to me - as I mentioned earlier, there's that whole issue about holding and being held. There's a relational aspect totally different to that found among other amputees. Imagine lying in bed with the one you love and not being able to hold her the way two-armed people do - not being able to gather her up and engulf her. That's one of the most incredibly sad things I can imagine.

Terminology is an interesting aspect of all this. Apparently, many amputees do still use "arm" in the plural - treating their prosthesis as part of the set - but I decided that Alex would not. I'm not sure why - except that he does use language with a certain precision. I wondered about things like making love - would he leave the prosthesis on, or take it off? And would the answer vary according to whether he was with his wife or a casual lover? The person I spoke to suggested that the decision would purely come down to who he was with. Apparently it doesn't really add anything in terms of leverage. We've always seen him with it on the show, so my assumption is that he wears it everywhere except bed. That means if he's making love in bed before or after sleep I write him without it, but if he's making love anywhere else (say, the ship on Patient X) I assume he's probably still wearing it.

There are interesting issues about Alex's comfort zone. He had no qualms about showing his prosthetic with Marita, the Kazakhstanis (Patient X), or the Consortium (Two Fathers). But in the presence of Skinner (Biogenesis), Mulder, and Scully (Requiem), he wears a leather glove. He told Mulder about his arm after punching him out. There's a clear undertone there about power, about being perceived as powerful and whole, and maybe about not really perceiving himself as powerful or whole deep down. In the Consortium and in Kazakhstan, he had other kinds of power, and his loss was probably viewed as a battle scar - an honourable wound - so he didn't mind having it on show. But among the FBI set, he's an outcast. His loss is just desserts - a visual proof of his treachery, like a mark of Cain. So he hides it. I'm still working out all the layers of this, but it's an interesting sidelight on Alex's nature.

I did some research into prosthetics and made a decision on the basis of what we've seen about what type and model of prosthetic he uses. On the show, he has a shaped, but not realistic hand with limited movement and a basic open-close function. That's consistent with a light myoelectrically controlled prosthesis which attaches to the stump and which straps across the chest to the opposite shoulder. The open-close function is achieved by the flexing of various muscles in the stump. There are other types; this one is mid-range financially and in terms of what it can do, and actually pretty low-range as far as aesthetics go. I don't think the powers that be gave the issue as much thought as I did - there are far better options which I think Alex would probably have taken. They just stuck a painted latex glove on Nick Lea's hand and told him not to move it too much. Whatever.

I don't know that there are pitfalls, as such. I guess the real pitfall is writing him as someone who isn't an amputee without having a damn good reason. I think, too, that sex writers miss the boat a lot of the time - the first time Alex takes his shirt off with a partner is always going to be a touchy (and touching) moment. I've only read a couple of stories that have done this well, including one very good one last year - an Alex/Jeffrey Spender piece called Wistful, by Drovar.

Conversely, I've read some awful, insensitive pieces. There was one a year ago where Scully and Skinner caught Krycek fucking Marita (and I do mean fucking, not making love) with his prosthesis. Quite apart from the fact that prostheses are expensive pieces of electronic equipment, why on earth would he take this constant reminder of his loss and use it in a sexual act? And why would she let him? That story, probably more than anything, got me thinking about the Krycek/Marita pairing with its stunning callousness. It brought out all my protective instincts for the underdog.

In terms of tips...watch for plural arms (you can use the find function on your word processor for this). Watch for things Alex is doing and work out whether that's really feasible with his limitations. If he's the "bottom" in a sex act, for instance, then rear-entry will almost certainly be on a bed, not on his hand and knees. If he's winching a car out of a ditch, where is he getting his leverage? If Marita is on his left, how can they hold hands? If she is on that side and he wants her close, he's not going to put his prosthetic around her waist; he'll draw her into what's left - the crook between his body and his stump. If you're getting really domestic, the division of chores between Alex and his partner will be determined in part by what he can and can't do. Whether or not he accepts the help of his partner will depend on their relationship. There are lots of things to look for. One person on RATales has an "arm beta" - a beta reader solely devoted to watching out for arm issues. This is quite a good idea for a Krycek writer, though I admit I haven't used one myself.

When we don't have a disability and we try to write someone with that disability, we have to think about it in the context of that person's whole being, not just in terms of what s/he can or can't do. A loss that intimate isn't just a functional one - it's almost an ontological one. Again, my model for this is Stephen King. His depiction of the experience of being deaf-mute (Nick Andros) and of retardation (Tom Cullen) in The Stand is compelling.

Megan, thank you for guiding the interview. I've had a great time exploring these issues...it's clarified a lot of my own thoughts about the craft of writing, and about writing within X-Files fandom. It's been a pleasure.