Episode 29 - Insider Interview Transcript
Insider Interview Transcript
Host: emmagrant01
Guest: Sfiddy
Emma Grant: This is the Insider Interview for Slashcast episode 29 our April fool’s edition, and my guest today is Michelle, whose penname is sfiddy. And first off, Michelle, I want to ask you what’s your primary fandom?
Michelle: Er, I write for Twilight.
Emma: And what’s your primary ship?
Michelle: Jacob and Bella. [laughs]
Emma: [laughs] Okay, so at this point people who listen to this podcast are probably going ‘what the fuck..?’, but let me just tell you don’t turn us off. Stop and listen, because you are going to love this conversation. This is going to be fantastic. Okay. So. What I want to start off with is asking Michelle is just to tell us about how you came to fandom in general, and how you started writing fanfiction?
Michelle: Well, it was funny because, er, you know I look back and I’ve had the fandom gene for most of my life. I used to read the Star Trek: Next Generation books when I was in Junior High and I even went to a couple of conventions. So right around the time my first born- whose name is Jacob, and you can so give me as much crap about that as you want [Emma laughs], it was after he was born that I read Twilight, so you can’t get me there - so he was about eighteen months old when he would actually sleep for more than three hours at a time, and I realised that I had more than fifteen minutes of free time in an evening, so-
Emma: [laughs] All the moms listening will appreciate that.
Michelle: I know! And I thought ‘my god there’s a hole in my day and I didn’t know what to do with myself’. So, everybody I knew had been reading Twilight and could not shut up about it. So, erm, I gave into the demons and bought the damn book, hated myself, bought the second book, hated myself even more, bought the third damn book [Emma laughs] and by that point you’re so emotionally invested in the absolute fuckery that is this series that you have to buy the fourth book just to find out what in the hell is gonna happen. [Emma laughs] And by that point, I mean of course I like to give the author the benefit of the doubt because it is their baby, it is their creation, and so I’m buying the Edward/Bella pairing up to this point though it is cringeworthy. If you don’t know there’s three doorstop sized books full of unresolved sexual tension, resulting in a fade to black on a privately owned island. Let me just say, I’m a big girl, full grown woman, this was very unsatisfying.
Emma: [in background, laughing] Yeah.
Michelle: And it occurred to me at that point, this little lightbulb went off in my where as I’m turning the damn page I’m like ‘dude there has got to be something out there’. So, like any normal person I went online and started searching for smut.
Emma: Awesome.
Michelle: And I came across a story called Warmth, which is considered, kind of, one of the biggest honeymoon scene fanfictions, read it, was impressed because I think it was written better than the Twilight series itself, and just sort of started to find my way through the web of fandom until I wound up at a website called Twilighted.net, started just perusing and, er, yeah, that’s kind of how ended up here. God help me.
Emma: So what, what inspired you to start writing your own fic?
Michelle: Well, as I was looking through the Twilighted website, you know it’s one of the ones that’s set up with, you know, with the top ten lists. And one of the series was, um, called ‘The Jacob and Bella Chronicles’, I think and it was posted by an author called diamondheart and she eventually became my beta and I liked what I saw. It was a compilation of all these Jacob and Bella pairings and I hadn’t even- it hadn’t even crossed my mind at that point that they were a viable pairing because honestly I did not know what non-canon was, ‘cause, you know, I was pretty new to the idea of fanfiction- maybe not fandom -but fanfiction. I really kind of liked the different values system I saw within this pairing. There was a lot more emphasis placed on, I don’t want to sound stupid here, but family values and the idea of valuing those around you as opposed to money, prestige, clothes, let’s, you know, let’s not talk about how many hoodies get worn in this series of books. But I just preferred the atmosphere. And somewhere along the way it sort of, you know, a scene starts to develop in your mind, I decide to take a different turn and next thing you know I have three chapters written.
Emma: Okay, so, I’m just going to lay this out here. In the circles that I run in people don’t like Twilight. I mean, so, I’m trying to think of, I, I honestly cannot think of anyone that I know who has read Twilight and liked it.
Michelle: Me neither.
Emma: Right. Or who had anything positive to say about it. What is it about Twilight that attracted you above other worthy things, like Star Trek? [both laugh] Well, what is it that attracted you?
Michelle: Do you love a story because of or in spite of its flaws? You know. It is, admittedly, one of the most flawed things I have ever read in my life. It really is. I mean, the writing... it, it’s alternatively bleak and purple, sometimes within the same page, I look at the craft and it’s like, ‘good god where were your editors here?’ But I think it’s the universe and the sets of relationships she’s set up, and the fact that it’s so screwed up that you just, part of you just feels like you have to fix it, at least for me. And again, I sail this with the caveat that I am certainly in the minority of the fandom and, er, we do take some crap for it. But at the same time I think there’s a healthy snootery among any fandom when you talk about the pairings you don’t like, but you know , whatever. You can look at it in a number of ways, I mean it can be one of these tortured romances, a la, you know, Wuthering Heights, it can be a cautionary tale because, you know, Edward’s pretty screwed up, it’s a family tragedy, it’s a story of family hope, it’s unrequited love, you know, in terms of Jacob. You know, there’s a lot of things you can pick and choose, and I guess one of the interesting things about the characters is that I don’t know you can actually call them characters, but they’re stereotypes in many ways. And so it’s really a fandom’s dream, because, I mean, characters don’t have much in the way of backstory so you can fill in whatever you want really. Pairings are loose, and have a lot of open ends. And I think that’s a sign of not that great writing if there’s that much potential in every single stinking corner of it. But again that makes for a lot of fandom possibilities, it’s kind of fun in that way. In all fairness I can understand from Stephanie Meyer’s point of view, perhaps, that she had no idea the absolute wildfire she would be setting off when she wrote these books and got them published. So I suspect she just didn’t have any idea where this was going when she first got her deal. You know an’ it makes for kind of an unfulfilling story, but great for fanfiction. The writing is very strange. There’s actually a great website, it’s a tumblr, called Reasoning with Vampires, and this woman, I don’t even know who she is, but she dissects - sentence by sentence - passages from Twilight and it’s just... I mean, I have cried reading this website, it’s absolutely a blast. Um, an- and, she, she puts up the best examples of this awkward stilted prose, there’s nothing worse actually than when you’re writing fanfiction and you’re trying to do what we kind of nicknamed Meyer-voice, and I have a friend named Audreyii_fic who does this. To- to-, I mean she tortures herself to the point of becoming ill to write in Meyer-voice, that’s how hard this is.
Emma: [laughing] Oh my God, Meyer-voice!
Michelle: And we call it Meyer-voice because nobody writes like this except her. I don’t know... where did this come from? But it’s like putting on a corset of bad introspection, dialogue tags, and then strangling your liver with it. [Emma laughing] I don’t know how else to describe it, but it’s such tortured prose, you like stick a dialogue tag everywhere, she does not let dialogue stand on its own ever. The villains aren’t really that villainous in the end. They’re just sort of having an ice cream social, you know? They just kind of get together, they’re kind of creepy and then they go away. Um, and I think that everyone can probably identify with this it’s Mary Sue, Mary Sue, Mary Sue, Mary Sue twenty four hours a day, Mary Sue. [Emma laughs] And somebody commented to me the other night that Mary Sue is not about what the character does, it’s how the author thinks about them.
Emma: Oh, yeah.
Michelle: And I think that was a very perceptive thing to note, because yes, it’s about what they do. If you haven’t read Twilight, and I assume most of your listenership either hasn’t, or won’t admit it - which is fine -, I don’t even own the books any more, they’re not even in my house.
Emma: What did you do with your books?
Michelle: I sold them to Half-Price Books, thank you very much. [Emma laughs] They had to leave, it was time for them to leave my shelf. Um, I know enough. I’m done.
Emma: I just have to- I just have to say that is amazing. One of my primary fandoms is Harry Potter and Harry Potter fans pride themselves on the number of versions of the books they own. Like-
Michelle: I know.
Emma: I have, like, the British version-
Michelle: [talks slightly over Emma] The leather-bound adult version.
Emma: Yes, exactly! That have, like the special versions that are all cloth-bound, I have the American versions, I have the British versions in paperback, I have the British versions in hardback, I own like eighty Harry Potter books total, and, and I just love the fact you don’t own any Twilight books any more.
Michelle: I don’t. I don- well, I take that back I have the first two books on my Kindle because I can’t bring myself to delete something I paid for-
Emma: Oh, yeah.
Michelle: That does not actually take up space.
Emma: True.
Michelle: But, er. No, the thing about Twilight is that it’s written in deep first-person point of view. And so, you not only get the character of Bella Swan, you are the character Bella Swan. Which results in why Meyer-voice is so torturous, it’s because you’re having to walk around in the brown girl’s shoes. And if you didn’t catch that joke it’s because at the beginning of Twilight she actually describes herself as brown-hair, brown-eyes, and short. I’m like ‘wow, you just described sixty percent of the female population. Awesome.’ How indistinct can your quote-unquote ‘heroine’ be? But, um, but yeah, it’s not only does she go from being, like, she thinks she’s so uncool and clumsy and yet everybody at the school wants to be her best friend, and, at the end of the series she’s like the most powerful character on the planet. It’s like, ‘Oh, thanks. The depth of character development was just awesome. Thank you.’
Emma: [laughs] That’s actually a good segue to, sort of, the next question that I have. Which is, okay, so what about slash? This is Slashcast. How much of a slash presence is there in the Twilight fandom?
Michelle: Probably more than you’d think.
Emma: That’s good. [laughs, Michelle joins in] I’m always pro-slash. I don’t care what the fandom is, bring it on!
Michelle: Well bear in mind that once you start getting movies come out, based on a book, it’s- the primary slash pairings are going to be the pretty people. And there’s lots of pretty people in the Twilight movies. The most popular slash pairing is Jasper and Edward, and, er, mostly vampire stories are the slash ones. Although there is, because trends come and go particularly in a fandom this large, there is a little more wolf, er, wolf-pack is the nickname, is wolf-pack slash. Um, there’s a couple characters who kind of a have a bromance anyway, and it’s a pair called Embry and Quill, and you occasionally run across pairings with that, also sometimes Jacob and Paul. Um, Paul’s supposed to be this very hot-headed guy and he kind of got into a fight with Jacob on time, so of course that’s where that went.
Emma: Yeah.
Michelle: Um.
Emma: That just says so much about slashers right there. ‘They got in a fight, they want each other, let’s write it!’
Michelle: I know. Exactly. Exactly. ‘They’re just covering up their feelings!’ Um, and then there’s also, kind, the May-December stuff with Carlisle and Edward with, and- with- and that almost hearkens back to, I suspect, a Star Wars sort of thing, because Carlisle made Edward, and so it’s sort of like he trained him, and therefore you have that pairing. And there’s also a significant amount of femmeslash as well.
Emma: Yeah, really? What kind of- what pairings of femmeslash?
Michelle: Actually a really popular one is, er, Leah, who is a wolf -the only female wolf apparently ever in the whole mythology of that - and Rosile who is the kind of blonde ice-queen of the Cullen family. So you occasionally see that one. Erm-
Emma: Any femmeslash with Bella?
Michelle: Oh of course, God yes. Good Lord, are you kidding? Okay Bella is kind of the standard female of pairing. You don’t see as much Alice, who’s supposed to be her best friend within the Cullen family, you don’t see Alice/Bella as much as you see Rosile/Bella, or Leah/Bella. And then there’s this nasty little piece of work in the Volturi Coven, the Volturi Coven, they’re supposed to be like the Royalty of the vampire family in Italy, there’s a nasty piece of work called Jane and she can put you in, like, torturous pain with her mind - it’s kind of like the Cruciatus Curse - but she can do it with her brain.
Emma: Oh, nice. There’s a lot of BDSM potential there, absolutely.
Michelle: There is massive amounts of BDSM potential in the, er, in the Twi-world.
Emma: Maybe this is a good time to go ahead and talk about the whole Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon. It’s so funny because, um, so we had a conversation the other weekend about this notion of fanfiction being turned into professional fiction that people were getting published. And there was a term that you used, that’s popular in the Twilight fandom, that I had never heard before. What was it?
Michelle: PtoP.
Emma: PtoP.
Michelle: It’s called poll-to-publish.
Emma: Poll-to-publish, wow. [Michelle makes a noise of agreement] Let’s talk about that, that’s fascinating to me.
Michelle: [laughs] Fifty Shades of Grey is absolutely not the first time this has happened. In fact when I joined the fandom, I want to say either one had already, or was about to be published. Again Twilighted.net created their own publishing house called Omnific, and it’s not a vanity press either, its, um, they do pay, you don’t have to pay to have your stuff published. And also The Writer’s Coffee Shop, are probably the two biggest ones that handle sort of the first stage of, you know, sort of swapping out terminology, certain identifying words and phrases and names, in order to take a fanfiction to an ‘original fiction’, quote-unquote. And I have to say that I think that Twilight is sort of unique, like I mentioned earlier, in that we don’t really have characters we have stereotypes, so it’s easy to pluck those stereotypes out of the context and then what has happened a lot is what we call AUAHOOC, the Alternate Universe, All Human, OOC fic, which at that point it’s debatable if you’re even writing fanfiction any more. A lot of times, even when you do that, they’ll still maintain pieces of the charactered archetype, and maintain that as part of their narrative. It’s, er, it’s a tricky issue I think and it’s probably one of the most, it’s the hottest topic right now in Twilight fanfiction. I understand that some of this has happened with the Harry Potter series, but certainly not to the extent that it’s happened here. This has been an all-consuming issue for us lately.
Emma: And I guess I find that really fascinating because if, if it was that easy to strip away the universe and the names and just plunk it into another place then people wouldn’t have liked the fic in the first place. I mean-
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: I guess I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately because my husband, my husband has always been like, ‘you know, you could just publish something, couldn’t you?’ He’s always like looking from this angle of ‘Couldn’t you just make money at this hobby that you love so much?’
Michelle: My husband is exactly the same.
Emma: Exactly, right? And I’m like ‘Oh my God you’re so missing the point of fandom.’ But if it’s that easy to strip the fandom away, were you writing fanfiction in the first place? Or were you writing something original?
Michelle: Right. Right. Well, one of the things I find very interesting, again, is that you can’t divorce the characters of Harry Potter out of the world that they’re from very easily. There is no reason for all of those characters to be in the same place together unless there is magic and Diagon Alley, and all these wonderful things. Whereas, opposed to that, Twilight really essentially starts with a bunch of High School students and character archetypes, and that’s not really, it’s not that unique.
Emma: Okay, so. Here’s something we talked about before, was is it fair? If you’re writing a piece of fanfiction, you’re posting it to fandom, you’re getting input from the fans, especially if you’re posting it as a WIP-
Michelle: Right.
Emma: You’re posting chapter by chapter, and now I’m currently posting a WIP so, I’m very conscious of this right now, this notion that you’re putting out a chapter at a time and you’re getting incredible feedback-
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: ... from people about whether or not what you’re doing is working-
Michelle: Right.
Emma: Whether the characterisations are working. You’re getting feedback about what they’re predicting about what’s going to happen...
Michelle: Right.
Emma: ...whether they’re buying the plot.
Michelle: Right. Right. [slightly talking over Emma] No, feedback is crack to a writer.
Emma: Feedb... Oh, God, exactly. So all this feedback that you’re getting when you post something, post something long as a WIP, so that feedback you’re giving it back to the fandom,-
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: ... is kind of something I’m thinking about. You’re writing this, you’re putting that back into fandom and that’s great. But then to turn around at take that whole thing and strip it off-
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: ...and then sell it for a million dollars. What?!
Michelle: Right, and it’s not only the feedback you get when you post a chapter. Think about the time that if you, you know, if had a beta. What about the time your beta and your pre-readers put into it? And if you weren’t up front with whole idea that, ‘Hey I’m just test marketing my book’, is that fair? Are you putting, you know, on the book cover, you know? Yeah. It’s- Not only that, I mean, there’s legality issues. In fact there’s a recent post on a website called DearAuthor.com, where they took text from the book Fifty Shades of Grey, next to the original fanfiction, which was called Master of the Universe, and I actually started reading it back when it was about ten chapters in, erm so I actually read it as it was being posted. And, erm. So they took these two texts and put them next to each other in a programme, I guess it’s called Turn It In. Erm.
Emma: Oh, right. Uh-huh.
Michelle: Right, so it’s a plagiarism check for college term papers. They found they were 89% the same. [Emma makes a noise of understanding] So, I want say that- The author E.L. James just signed a deal with Random House here in the States. She’s currently only published in paper form - well, I think she got picked up by The Writer’s Coffee shop, then she was picked by a publishing house based out of the UK, and now she’s crossed the pond here, to be picked up by Random House. So this was a massive deal that happened, I think, last weekend? You know there’s mounting criticism about this whether you agree or not, whatever. But Random House actually sent out this rather defensive letter to the public saying that this is an original work. And, sort of, the troll element out there took the two and put them next to each other and said, you know, if you turned this in as a term paper in college you’d get expelled for plagiarism. And I guess the issue here is that because it was originally posted as fanfiction, and I think the heart of fanfiction is the fact that that - either because you’re doing it out of love, or because you want to fix it, or whatever, - you’re doing it in respect to the original work.
Emma: Right.
Michelle: And you cannot take any payment for it in any way, shape, or form. You know the only payment we get is reviews, we like to say, of course.
Emma: Yes.
Michelle: And now the question is if you originally posted this - and the internet is forever - if you originally posted this without being paid, can you now be paid for it, though you changed the names? So, yeah. It’s a legal grey area and there’s actually, there’s actually new websites that give advice on how to file the numbers off your fanfiction to, er, get it published. Yeah, there’s a lot of mixed feelings out there. And some are arguing that it’s going to kill the fandom, and I don’t think that’s really going to happen, because there’s only a portion of the fandom that’s going to get tied up in this and the rest of us just don’t give a damn. Even in the fen that does go along is probably going to self destruct because they keep getting tied up in the idea of getting published that, I think, they’re wandering away anyway. And sadly right now, I think among sort of the big name authors there’s an attitude that if you’re not trying to get published that ‘why are you writing at all?’
Emma: Oh, my God.
Michelle: And it’s like, wow, you’re off the boat.
Emma: Right.
Michelle: It’s like you’ve jumped off, you’re swimming away. So.
Emma: Yeah, that, that always makes me crazy. When people say that-
Michelle: Yeah, it’s- you know, you kind of missed the boat, and fare thee well.
Emma: Exactly. I presented you as if you were writing you know Jacob/Bella fic all the time. But, just to be completely honest, you’ve actually written slash, correct?
Michelle: I have, and it’s still posted. Yes.
Emma: So tell us about that.
Michelle: I had a male reader for my big work in progress, who, um, I asked him to do some pre-reading for me because he actually gave me some interesting feedback on some stuff I’d written. This young man was kind enough to send me back a message, on what I call my first ‘big girl lemon’ in my story. It was the first full-blown sex scene I’d ever written, and it is a virgin on virgin sex scene and I wanted to kill myself after I wrote it. [Emma laughs] So, anyway, he sent me back a note when he gave me some comments on the chapter and he, he kind of said, almost in passing, you know, ‘have you ever thought about writing slash?’ and I kind of gave him the side eyes and said ‘why do you say that?’, um, and he said ‘because you write, you wrote very carefully and you treated this, you know, very well, you know, you might think about it.’ And of course I laughed him off, and a week later, sonofabitch, I had an opening scene in my head.
Emma: [Slightly cackling laugh] And it begins...
Michelle: And, um- and it begins. So, I guess this all comes from the idea that, um, for this story - it’s called Etude - and, er, it’s based on the idea that, um, the reason why Edward has so many hang ups is because he just doesn’t realise that he ain’t straight, and I think that is the only explanation for Edward, frankly. [Emma laughs] So in canon Edward, um, was 17 years old when he was changed into a vampire, in the year 1918, because he had the flu. Which, you know, if you know anything about the pandemic flu, you know it kill yo’ ass. [Emma laughs] So this would have been, like I said, 1918, it’s a very, sort of, post Victorian mentality that the young man has and this supposedly influences his thinking about everything from sex to what people think, because he can read minds so therefore he is constantly pummelled by people’s thought processes. I decided to, er, play on that theme, so it’s basically your typical self-actualisation, self-realisation story in that regard, hence why it’s all a little bit long, and a little bit tortured, but I try to keep it moving along by interjecting lots of other sex into-
Emma: I like the way you say that: ‘interjecting other sex,’ and ... yeah, go on.
Michelle: I wrote it very slowly, and I hand-waved, um, quite a few things that I didn’t realise you either don’t have to, or maybe you should. Because it the first time I’d ever written anything that- well, let me back up - I had written a lime and a lemon, by lime, of course, I mean vagueish sexual content, or just not very explicit, and lemon: explicit, and those were in my work in progress stories, and then the next thing I wrote was, you know, a fairly explicit blowjob, and then a less explicit blowjob, and then a straight-up male/male/male threesome that involved spit-roasting Edward Cullen.
Emma: I think I wanna read that.
Michelle: Thank you. But, erm, no, it is pretty explicit and I got quite a lot of help from that young man, Bragi151.
Emma: So what are your goals in fandom? What are you working on now and where might you be headed. What other fandoms might you be interested in? Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
Michelle: [laughs] My big thing right now is to finish my current Work in Progress, which is called Sublimation, it’s a beast of a monster, it’s- it’s big. Currently 25 chapters long, topping 200,000 words. I’m basically re-writing, not to say that I’m writing Twilight, but I’ve completely veered it off in a different direction to make it work for me, and it seems to work for others as well, which is kind of nice. I always have ideas for one-shots, and I honestly believe that one-shots are heart of fanfiction, but the neat thing about the one-shot is that it can be anything you want it to be. It can be a story, like Etude is - my slash story - or it can be, you know, just that little moment that you want to capture. Maybe you just like the look of somebody in your mind, and you wanna fill that out, which is sort of what I did with the Harry Potter one-shot I wrote. And then after I finish up with maybe finishing this story, and then a short arc afterwards I’m kind of starting to get enamoured of other fandoms again. I think we discussed the possibility of me writing a Sherlock story.
Emma: [sing-songy] Yes! Yes, yes, yes!
Michelle: I am- I will be- I actually-
Emma: Sorry, let me just squee on this. This will be, this will be John/Sherlock, right? Am I right?
Michelle: Um, I like the bromance thing, not so much taking it to the explicit level, but I like the idea of maintaining sort of this odd-ball, like, ‘what the hell’s going on between you two?’ sort of a-
Emma: I’ll take it, I’ll take it. [laughs]
Michelle: For me, I don’t know, I guess I’m still hung up on the Granada series. I still have a hard time not seeing Jeremy Brett as Sherlock.
Emma: Aww. Aww.
Michelle: And- oh, I know, isn’t that sweet? Um,
Emma: It is.
Michelle: But I have to say that, erm, the new version of Sherlock Holmes really is striking. I’m looking forward to seeing the second season of episodes, who knows I might get some better ideas then.
Emma: Oh, when you watch series two, yeah. We’ve talked about this already.
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: We’ll talk- we can talk about it more off-mic. But yes.
Michelle: [laughs] And I also kind of have an idea for doing more with Severus Snape. Er-
Emma: Ooh, nice.
Michelle: Yeah. Well he is one of my favourites. Or maybe Hermione. I don’t know if I could write a Snape/Hermione ship, it has to be handled so carefully for me to like it. And there’s only one author, well maybe two authors, I know of so far that do it how I like it. I also have some original fiction ideas as well, but fanfiction really is, it really frees you to do, sort of, character analysis and, and just fool around with someone else’s toys, which everybody knows you love to do.
Emma: Oh yeah, so much fun. And I think too, whenever I- whenever my husband says ‘you should do something you can make money at’, and I keep thinking, ‘but then I couldn’t be in fandom any more’. I mean, for me it’s about the people, and the community. It sounds like you have that too, that in the Twilight fandom as well you’ve got the sort of community, and these people-
Michelle: You do. You do.
Emma: Well, I think we can move on to the Final Questions. What is your favourite fic of all time?
Michelle: You know, it might not be a Twilight story. It might be a Harry Potter story.
Emma: Ohh, nice.
Michelle: Thank you. One of my absolute favourite writers is a lady named Aurette, and she writes a Snape/Hermione ship most of the time. There’s this, it’s a two shot, it’s really short, it’s called The Tattered Man. And it is really sad, it’s really tragic, it’s a variation on the Marriage Law fic, and it is just delicious. It’s just stunning, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back and read it.
Emma: Ohh, wow.
Michelle: My favourite parody is probably I Wanna Eff You Like a Masochistic Lion.
Emma: [laughs] That is the best title ever! Oh my God.
Michelle: And that’s not even the whole title! There was a- there’s a-
Emma: And it’s literl- it’s eff you it’s not fuck you? It’s Eff you?
Michelle: It’s E F F. There’s a line in Twilight, ‘and the lion laid down with the lamb’, it’s just an excerpt from the Bible. It’s as hard-core paradoy as they get. And it parodises not just Twilight, but fanfanfiction, an’, an’, an’ just typical things, from, you know ‘the heroine always has tiny hands’, type of stuff. It is just knock-down, drag out hilarious.
Emma: Fantastic.
Michelle: There is another, there is an excellent Twilight fanfiction called Becoming Bella Swan, it’s a brain bender, but it’s really neat.
Emma: Nice. Okay, cool. We’ll post those links, definitely. What about fan art?
Michelle: Funny you mention that. There is a- there’s actually great fanart in the Twilight world, both in terms of, like, banner making type of stuff, all the way to original art that is just stunning. So, one of my favourites is a lady by the name Nikitajuice, again this is coming from the Jacob Black side of the fandom - there’s fantastic art also from the vampire-centric side as well - but nikitajuice is probably best known for an image called Breaking Jacob, and it is this incredibly striking image of, it’s Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black, holding his chest and there is just blood leaking from around where his heart is. And it is...amazing. It’s a very, very striking image.
Emma: Oh, that’s lovely. So, what is your OTP, then?
Michelle: Okay, yeah, Jacob and Bella.
Emma: Jacob and Bella!
Michelle: Right so this, these two are, they were friends as children. Their dads are best friends. The thing about Jacob is that even when Bella was what I like to call water damaged, and scratched and dented after Edward left her in the second book. He still wants her even though she’s kind of messed up. And he kind of helps her come back to herself after being so damaged and so on. It’s just...he always liked her, and that never changed. And I can really respect that. And he gets angry on her behalf, as opposed to angry at her, or angry at the situation, he’s angry for her because of the situation she finds herself in. Um. At no time does he try to take away her ability to choose, um, Edward many times tells, Bella tells her that no, she can’t do something for her own good - which I think is remarkably insulting - Edward at one point actually disables her vehicle, so that she can’t go visit Jacob, who is her best friend in the story. If I had dated a guy like that my dad would have shot him.
Emma: Seriously.
Michelle: That’s actually a major reason why there is a Team Jacob presence, er, that’s so powerful and really fervent, because if you think about the behaviours that Edward displays in the story he’s hitting all the major stop signs-
Emma: Right.
Michelle: -for getting a restraining order. I mean, for Pete’s sake, in the first book he sneaks in her room to watch her sleep, what could be creepier than that?
Emma: [chuckles] Yeah. Oh my God. And I think that’s the thing I hear over and over, is that- a problem people have with Twilight is that if you just take the books at face value that it’s sending really bad messages to girls about what to expect from relationships.
Michelle: Right. And that actually leads into, you know, what the big tropes of Twilight are, and yeah that’s a major one. It’s like this- How is that okay? This is not love, this is hijacking. This is not healthy.
Emma: So what’s the best fee- piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten for something you’ve written?
Michelle: Early on I got some nice reviews, when I first started posting Sublimation, some folks made the comment ‘you’re going in the right direction, can you go a little further?’ They kind of encouraged me to push the concepts that I was already, sort of, fostering, and they encouraged me to go ahead and explore as far as I wanted to go. And I already kind of knew I was heading in that direction, but I was a little afraid of the idea, and I was very, very, self conscious early on, and that kind of shows in the writing actually, because, I think, as I became a little more confident the writing stopped being so much like Stephanie Meyer’s and took on a little bit more of the style that I tend to write in. I think as I’ve done that the story has improved. Overall my writing has improved. I think people just telling me that, no you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to tag everything, you don’t have to write like her - that first real lemon, the virgin sex scene, I actually got a lot of feedback from people who actually said wow, that was a really solid scene that was actually evocative of some very powerful emotion. And I was really kind of floored by that because I was really kind of terrified as hell to post that chapter.
Emma: Yeah.
Michelle: Yeah. Transformative moment there, when I hit the post button at fanfiction.net to post that chapter.
Emma: Yeah, no, that first sex scene, yeah, that’s, like, that notion of burying your head in the pillow, trying to ‘oh my god am I really going to really write this? And are other people going to read it?’
Michelle: ‘Please, God, don’t let my mother ever read this.’
Emma: Exactly. That’s... it’s, it’s fantastic.[Michelle laughs]That’s so cool. So what’s your fa- what’s your biggest kink, then, in fic? What’s the thing that you love to read?
Michelle: Well it’s a running joke that, you know, however you can kill Edward, um, [Emma laughs] is pretty entertaining. That’s actually just a running joke on how to do that. I like to read anything that breaks the tropes. Give me something original, that’s what I wanna see. I like seeing original stuff built in canon. I like sticking to the mostly canon world, because, well, that’s why I came here in the first place, so breaking these, these things that make us so crazy, or make us fall in love with it, or, you know, become our unifying themes. Breaking those apart I really enjoy. Not so much just for the sexual aspect, but take what we were given, and what brought us to our laptops at, you know, two o’clock in the morning, and show me how it can be done better.
Emma: What pairing have you never written that you would like to try?
Michelle: You know, when I first started reading Twilight fanfiction, the first idea I got was for Jasper and Bella. And I have in my mind this really awesome story that I first wanted to work on, but the other story took off faster. And it’s basically a Tarantino meets Twilight.
Emma: Oh, wow. [laughs]
Michelle: As whacky as that sounds, I mean, it is just nothing but graphic violence and revenge, it’s kind of like Kill Bill.
Emma: So what advice do you have for people who are starting out writing fanfic in, really in any fandom, but maybe in Twilight in particular, since that’s what we’re talking about?
Michelle: If you’re going to be writing fanfiction, it’s probably because you’ve been reading fanfiction. Pay attention to the names that people refer to. So if somebody has said that someone’s their beta, if somebody mentions that, hey this person did pre-reading for me, check out that person’s work. Check out the circle of people that you- that the writing you like, the things that you find you’re reading most often. And review. See if they respond, because the authors who respond are more likely to be favourable to the idea of maybe, kind of, fostering you under their wing, if that’s what you’re looking for, but the ultimate thing for anything you’re writing is write.
Emma: Absolutely.
Michelle: Write, write, write.
Emma: Yeah. Absolutely. And finally. What question do people never ask you that they wish they would?
Michelle: Since I am a Jacob writer, primarily, I wish someone from the Edward ship would ask me why I write Jacob. Just that very basic question, because I’m just not sure that we speak the same language sometimes. Yeah, it’s just like sometimes just don’t get each other, which is fine, you know, different ships. Just ask me why, ‘cause I wanna tell you why. Maybe I just want to point out why I think you’re crazy. I don’t know.
Emma: [laughs]Well I think that wraps us up for this discussion, thank you so much, Michelle for taking time-
Michelle: Sure.
Emma: - to come and talk to us about Twilight fandom and everything.
Michelle: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Emma: Oh it’s been fantastic. So as always, links to everything we’ve discussed will be posted on the slashcast LJ at slashcast.livejournal.com, and also on our website, and if you have any questions or comments for Michelle please leave them on the post-show-post. And that’s it for this episode, so we’ll see you next time, and happy slashing!
Transcribed by: angelbabe_cj
Host: emmagrant01
Guest: Sfiddy
Emma Grant: This is the Insider Interview for Slashcast episode 29 our April fool’s edition, and my guest today is Michelle, whose penname is sfiddy. And first off, Michelle, I want to ask you what’s your primary fandom?
Michelle: Er, I write for Twilight.
Emma: And what’s your primary ship?
Michelle: Jacob and Bella. [laughs]
Emma: [laughs] Okay, so at this point people who listen to this podcast are probably going ‘what the fuck..?’, but let me just tell you don’t turn us off. Stop and listen, because you are going to love this conversation. This is going to be fantastic. Okay. So. What I want to start off with is asking Michelle is just to tell us about how you came to fandom in general, and how you started writing fanfiction?
Michelle: Well, it was funny because, er, you know I look back and I’ve had the fandom gene for most of my life. I used to read the Star Trek: Next Generation books when I was in Junior High and I even went to a couple of conventions. So right around the time my first born- whose name is Jacob, and you can so give me as much crap about that as you want [Emma laughs], it was after he was born that I read Twilight, so you can’t get me there - so he was about eighteen months old when he would actually sleep for more than three hours at a time, and I realised that I had more than fifteen minutes of free time in an evening, so-
Emma: [laughs] All the moms listening will appreciate that.
Michelle: I know! And I thought ‘my god there’s a hole in my day and I didn’t know what to do with myself’. So, everybody I knew had been reading Twilight and could not shut up about it. So, erm, I gave into the demons and bought the damn book, hated myself, bought the second book, hated myself even more, bought the third damn book [Emma laughs] and by that point you’re so emotionally invested in the absolute fuckery that is this series that you have to buy the fourth book just to find out what in the hell is gonna happen. [Emma laughs] And by that point, I mean of course I like to give the author the benefit of the doubt because it is their baby, it is their creation, and so I’m buying the Edward/Bella pairing up to this point though it is cringeworthy. If you don’t know there’s three doorstop sized books full of unresolved sexual tension, resulting in a fade to black on a privately owned island. Let me just say, I’m a big girl, full grown woman, this was very unsatisfying.
Emma: [in background, laughing] Yeah.
Michelle: And it occurred to me at that point, this little lightbulb went off in my where as I’m turning the damn page I’m like ‘dude there has got to be something out there’. So, like any normal person I went online and started searching for smut.
Emma: Awesome.
Michelle: And I came across a story called Warmth, which is considered, kind of, one of the biggest honeymoon scene fanfictions, read it, was impressed because I think it was written better than the Twilight series itself, and just sort of started to find my way through the web of fandom until I wound up at a website called Twilighted.net, started just perusing and, er, yeah, that’s kind of how ended up here. God help me.
Emma: So what, what inspired you to start writing your own fic?
Michelle: Well, as I was looking through the Twilighted website, you know it’s one of the ones that’s set up with, you know, with the top ten lists. And one of the series was, um, called ‘The Jacob and Bella Chronicles’, I think and it was posted by an author called diamondheart and she eventually became my beta and I liked what I saw. It was a compilation of all these Jacob and Bella pairings and I hadn’t even- it hadn’t even crossed my mind at that point that they were a viable pairing because honestly I did not know what non-canon was, ‘cause, you know, I was pretty new to the idea of fanfiction- maybe not fandom -but fanfiction. I really kind of liked the different values system I saw within this pairing. There was a lot more emphasis placed on, I don’t want to sound stupid here, but family values and the idea of valuing those around you as opposed to money, prestige, clothes, let’s, you know, let’s not talk about how many hoodies get worn in this series of books. But I just preferred the atmosphere. And somewhere along the way it sort of, you know, a scene starts to develop in your mind, I decide to take a different turn and next thing you know I have three chapters written.
Emma: Okay, so, I’m just going to lay this out here. In the circles that I run in people don’t like Twilight. I mean, so, I’m trying to think of, I, I honestly cannot think of anyone that I know who has read Twilight and liked it.
Michelle: Me neither.
Emma: Right. Or who had anything positive to say about it. What is it about Twilight that attracted you above other worthy things, like Star Trek? [both laugh] Well, what is it that attracted you?
Michelle: Do you love a story because of or in spite of its flaws? You know. It is, admittedly, one of the most flawed things I have ever read in my life. It really is. I mean, the writing... it, it’s alternatively bleak and purple, sometimes within the same page, I look at the craft and it’s like, ‘good god where were your editors here?’ But I think it’s the universe and the sets of relationships she’s set up, and the fact that it’s so screwed up that you just, part of you just feels like you have to fix it, at least for me. And again, I sail this with the caveat that I am certainly in the minority of the fandom and, er, we do take some crap for it. But at the same time I think there’s a healthy snootery among any fandom when you talk about the pairings you don’t like, but you know , whatever. You can look at it in a number of ways, I mean it can be one of these tortured romances, a la, you know, Wuthering Heights, it can be a cautionary tale because, you know, Edward’s pretty screwed up, it’s a family tragedy, it’s a story of family hope, it’s unrequited love, you know, in terms of Jacob. You know, there’s a lot of things you can pick and choose, and I guess one of the interesting things about the characters is that I don’t know you can actually call them characters, but they’re stereotypes in many ways. And so it’s really a fandom’s dream, because, I mean, characters don’t have much in the way of backstory so you can fill in whatever you want really. Pairings are loose, and have a lot of open ends. And I think that’s a sign of not that great writing if there’s that much potential in every single stinking corner of it. But again that makes for a lot of fandom possibilities, it’s kind of fun in that way. In all fairness I can understand from Stephanie Meyer’s point of view, perhaps, that she had no idea the absolute wildfire she would be setting off when she wrote these books and got them published. So I suspect she just didn’t have any idea where this was going when she first got her deal. You know an’ it makes for kind of an unfulfilling story, but great for fanfiction. The writing is very strange. There’s actually a great website, it’s a tumblr, called Reasoning with Vampires, and this woman, I don’t even know who she is, but she dissects - sentence by sentence - passages from Twilight and it’s just... I mean, I have cried reading this website, it’s absolutely a blast. Um, an- and, she, she puts up the best examples of this awkward stilted prose, there’s nothing worse actually than when you’re writing fanfiction and you’re trying to do what we kind of nicknamed Meyer-voice, and I have a friend named Audreyii_fic who does this. To- to-, I mean she tortures herself to the point of becoming ill to write in Meyer-voice, that’s how hard this is.
Emma: [laughing] Oh my God, Meyer-voice!
Michelle: And we call it Meyer-voice because nobody writes like this except her. I don’t know... where did this come from? But it’s like putting on a corset of bad introspection, dialogue tags, and then strangling your liver with it. [Emma laughing] I don’t know how else to describe it, but it’s such tortured prose, you like stick a dialogue tag everywhere, she does not let dialogue stand on its own ever. The villains aren’t really that villainous in the end. They’re just sort of having an ice cream social, you know? They just kind of get together, they’re kind of creepy and then they go away. Um, and I think that everyone can probably identify with this it’s Mary Sue, Mary Sue, Mary Sue, Mary Sue twenty four hours a day, Mary Sue. [Emma laughs] And somebody commented to me the other night that Mary Sue is not about what the character does, it’s how the author thinks about them.
Emma: Oh, yeah.
Michelle: And I think that was a very perceptive thing to note, because yes, it’s about what they do. If you haven’t read Twilight, and I assume most of your listenership either hasn’t, or won’t admit it - which is fine -, I don’t even own the books any more, they’re not even in my house.
Emma: What did you do with your books?
Michelle: I sold them to Half-Price Books, thank you very much. [Emma laughs] They had to leave, it was time for them to leave my shelf. Um, I know enough. I’m done.
Emma: I just have to- I just have to say that is amazing. One of my primary fandoms is Harry Potter and Harry Potter fans pride themselves on the number of versions of the books they own. Like-
Michelle: I know.
Emma: I have, like, the British version-
Michelle: [talks slightly over Emma] The leather-bound adult version.
Emma: Yes, exactly! That have, like the special versions that are all cloth-bound, I have the American versions, I have the British versions in paperback, I have the British versions in hardback, I own like eighty Harry Potter books total, and, and I just love the fact you don’t own any Twilight books any more.
Michelle: I don’t. I don- well, I take that back I have the first two books on my Kindle because I can’t bring myself to delete something I paid for-
Emma: Oh, yeah.
Michelle: That does not actually take up space.
Emma: True.
Michelle: But, er. No, the thing about Twilight is that it’s written in deep first-person point of view. And so, you not only get the character of Bella Swan, you are the character Bella Swan. Which results in why Meyer-voice is so torturous, it’s because you’re having to walk around in the brown girl’s shoes. And if you didn’t catch that joke it’s because at the beginning of Twilight she actually describes herself as brown-hair, brown-eyes, and short. I’m like ‘wow, you just described sixty percent of the female population. Awesome.’ How indistinct can your quote-unquote ‘heroine’ be? But, um, but yeah, it’s not only does she go from being, like, she thinks she’s so uncool and clumsy and yet everybody at the school wants to be her best friend, and, at the end of the series she’s like the most powerful character on the planet. It’s like, ‘Oh, thanks. The depth of character development was just awesome. Thank you.’
Emma: [laughs] That’s actually a good segue to, sort of, the next question that I have. Which is, okay, so what about slash? This is Slashcast. How much of a slash presence is there in the Twilight fandom?
Michelle: Probably more than you’d think.
Emma: That’s good. [laughs, Michelle joins in] I’m always pro-slash. I don’t care what the fandom is, bring it on!
Michelle: Well bear in mind that once you start getting movies come out, based on a book, it’s- the primary slash pairings are going to be the pretty people. And there’s lots of pretty people in the Twilight movies. The most popular slash pairing is Jasper and Edward, and, er, mostly vampire stories are the slash ones. Although there is, because trends come and go particularly in a fandom this large, there is a little more wolf, er, wolf-pack is the nickname, is wolf-pack slash. Um, there’s a couple characters who kind of a have a bromance anyway, and it’s a pair called Embry and Quill, and you occasionally run across pairings with that, also sometimes Jacob and Paul. Um, Paul’s supposed to be this very hot-headed guy and he kind of got into a fight with Jacob on time, so of course that’s where that went.
Emma: Yeah.
Michelle: Um.
Emma: That just says so much about slashers right there. ‘They got in a fight, they want each other, let’s write it!’
Michelle: I know. Exactly. Exactly. ‘They’re just covering up their feelings!’ Um, and then there’s also, kind, the May-December stuff with Carlisle and Edward with, and- with- and that almost hearkens back to, I suspect, a Star Wars sort of thing, because Carlisle made Edward, and so it’s sort of like he trained him, and therefore you have that pairing. And there’s also a significant amount of femmeslash as well.
Emma: Yeah, really? What kind of- what pairings of femmeslash?
Michelle: Actually a really popular one is, er, Leah, who is a wolf -the only female wolf apparently ever in the whole mythology of that - and Rosile who is the kind of blonde ice-queen of the Cullen family. So you occasionally see that one. Erm-
Emma: Any femmeslash with Bella?
Michelle: Oh of course, God yes. Good Lord, are you kidding? Okay Bella is kind of the standard female of pairing. You don’t see as much Alice, who’s supposed to be her best friend within the Cullen family, you don’t see Alice/Bella as much as you see Rosile/Bella, or Leah/Bella. And then there’s this nasty little piece of work in the Volturi Coven, the Volturi Coven, they’re supposed to be like the Royalty of the vampire family in Italy, there’s a nasty piece of work called Jane and she can put you in, like, torturous pain with her mind - it’s kind of like the Cruciatus Curse - but she can do it with her brain.
Emma: Oh, nice. There’s a lot of BDSM potential there, absolutely.
Michelle: There is massive amounts of BDSM potential in the, er, in the Twi-world.
Emma: Maybe this is a good time to go ahead and talk about the whole Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon. It’s so funny because, um, so we had a conversation the other weekend about this notion of fanfiction being turned into professional fiction that people were getting published. And there was a term that you used, that’s popular in the Twilight fandom, that I had never heard before. What was it?
Michelle: PtoP.
Emma: PtoP.
Michelle: It’s called poll-to-publish.
Emma: Poll-to-publish, wow. [Michelle makes a noise of agreement] Let’s talk about that, that’s fascinating to me.
Michelle: [laughs] Fifty Shades of Grey is absolutely not the first time this has happened. In fact when I joined the fandom, I want to say either one had already, or was about to be published. Again Twilighted.net created their own publishing house called Omnific, and it’s not a vanity press either, its, um, they do pay, you don’t have to pay to have your stuff published. And also The Writer’s Coffee Shop, are probably the two biggest ones that handle sort of the first stage of, you know, sort of swapping out terminology, certain identifying words and phrases and names, in order to take a fanfiction to an ‘original fiction’, quote-unquote. And I have to say that I think that Twilight is sort of unique, like I mentioned earlier, in that we don’t really have characters we have stereotypes, so it’s easy to pluck those stereotypes out of the context and then what has happened a lot is what we call AUAHOOC, the Alternate Universe, All Human, OOC fic, which at that point it’s debatable if you’re even writing fanfiction any more. A lot of times, even when you do that, they’ll still maintain pieces of the charactered archetype, and maintain that as part of their narrative. It’s, er, it’s a tricky issue I think and it’s probably one of the most, it’s the hottest topic right now in Twilight fanfiction. I understand that some of this has happened with the Harry Potter series, but certainly not to the extent that it’s happened here. This has been an all-consuming issue for us lately.
Emma: And I guess I find that really fascinating because if, if it was that easy to strip away the universe and the names and just plunk it into another place then people wouldn’t have liked the fic in the first place. I mean-
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: I guess I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately because my husband, my husband has always been like, ‘you know, you could just publish something, couldn’t you?’ He’s always like looking from this angle of ‘Couldn’t you just make money at this hobby that you love so much?’
Michelle: My husband is exactly the same.
Emma: Exactly, right? And I’m like ‘Oh my God you’re so missing the point of fandom.’ But if it’s that easy to strip the fandom away, were you writing fanfiction in the first place? Or were you writing something original?
Michelle: Right. Right. Well, one of the things I find very interesting, again, is that you can’t divorce the characters of Harry Potter out of the world that they’re from very easily. There is no reason for all of those characters to be in the same place together unless there is magic and Diagon Alley, and all these wonderful things. Whereas, opposed to that, Twilight really essentially starts with a bunch of High School students and character archetypes, and that’s not really, it’s not that unique.
Emma: Okay, so. Here’s something we talked about before, was is it fair? If you’re writing a piece of fanfiction, you’re posting it to fandom, you’re getting input from the fans, especially if you’re posting it as a WIP-
Michelle: Right.
Emma: You’re posting chapter by chapter, and now I’m currently posting a WIP so, I’m very conscious of this right now, this notion that you’re putting out a chapter at a time and you’re getting incredible feedback-
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: ... from people about whether or not what you’re doing is working-
Michelle: Right.
Emma: Whether the characterisations are working. You’re getting feedback about what they’re predicting about what’s going to happen...
Michelle: Right.
Emma: ...whether they’re buying the plot.
Michelle: Right. Right. [slightly talking over Emma] No, feedback is crack to a writer.
Emma: Feedb... Oh, God, exactly. So all this feedback that you’re getting when you post something, post something long as a WIP, so that feedback you’re giving it back to the fandom,-
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: ... is kind of something I’m thinking about. You’re writing this, you’re putting that back into fandom and that’s great. But then to turn around at take that whole thing and strip it off-
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: ...and then sell it for a million dollars. What?!
Michelle: Right, and it’s not only the feedback you get when you post a chapter. Think about the time that if you, you know, if had a beta. What about the time your beta and your pre-readers put into it? And if you weren’t up front with whole idea that, ‘Hey I’m just test marketing my book’, is that fair? Are you putting, you know, on the book cover, you know? Yeah. It’s- Not only that, I mean, there’s legality issues. In fact there’s a recent post on a website called DearAuthor.com, where they took text from the book Fifty Shades of Grey, next to the original fanfiction, which was called Master of the Universe, and I actually started reading it back when it was about ten chapters in, erm so I actually read it as it was being posted. And, erm. So they took these two texts and put them next to each other in a programme, I guess it’s called Turn It In. Erm.
Emma: Oh, right. Uh-huh.
Michelle: Right, so it’s a plagiarism check for college term papers. They found they were 89% the same. [Emma makes a noise of understanding] So, I want say that- The author E.L. James just signed a deal with Random House here in the States. She’s currently only published in paper form - well, I think she got picked up by The Writer’s Coffee shop, then she was picked by a publishing house based out of the UK, and now she’s crossed the pond here, to be picked up by Random House. So this was a massive deal that happened, I think, last weekend? You know there’s mounting criticism about this whether you agree or not, whatever. But Random House actually sent out this rather defensive letter to the public saying that this is an original work. And, sort of, the troll element out there took the two and put them next to each other and said, you know, if you turned this in as a term paper in college you’d get expelled for plagiarism. And I guess the issue here is that because it was originally posted as fanfiction, and I think the heart of fanfiction is the fact that that - either because you’re doing it out of love, or because you want to fix it, or whatever, - you’re doing it in respect to the original work.
Emma: Right.
Michelle: And you cannot take any payment for it in any way, shape, or form. You know the only payment we get is reviews, we like to say, of course.
Emma: Yes.
Michelle: And now the question is if you originally posted this - and the internet is forever - if you originally posted this without being paid, can you now be paid for it, though you changed the names? So, yeah. It’s a legal grey area and there’s actually, there’s actually new websites that give advice on how to file the numbers off your fanfiction to, er, get it published. Yeah, there’s a lot of mixed feelings out there. And some are arguing that it’s going to kill the fandom, and I don’t think that’s really going to happen, because there’s only a portion of the fandom that’s going to get tied up in this and the rest of us just don’t give a damn. Even in the fen that does go along is probably going to self destruct because they keep getting tied up in the idea of getting published that, I think, they’re wandering away anyway. And sadly right now, I think among sort of the big name authors there’s an attitude that if you’re not trying to get published that ‘why are you writing at all?’
Emma: Oh, my God.
Michelle: And it’s like, wow, you’re off the boat.
Emma: Right.
Michelle: It’s like you’ve jumped off, you’re swimming away. So.
Emma: Yeah, that, that always makes me crazy. When people say that-
Michelle: Yeah, it’s- you know, you kind of missed the boat, and fare thee well.
Emma: Exactly. I presented you as if you were writing you know Jacob/Bella fic all the time. But, just to be completely honest, you’ve actually written slash, correct?
Michelle: I have, and it’s still posted. Yes.
Emma: So tell us about that.
Michelle: I had a male reader for my big work in progress, who, um, I asked him to do some pre-reading for me because he actually gave me some interesting feedback on some stuff I’d written. This young man was kind enough to send me back a message, on what I call my first ‘big girl lemon’ in my story. It was the first full-blown sex scene I’d ever written, and it is a virgin on virgin sex scene and I wanted to kill myself after I wrote it. [Emma laughs] So, anyway, he sent me back a note when he gave me some comments on the chapter and he, he kind of said, almost in passing, you know, ‘have you ever thought about writing slash?’ and I kind of gave him the side eyes and said ‘why do you say that?’, um, and he said ‘because you write, you wrote very carefully and you treated this, you know, very well, you know, you might think about it.’ And of course I laughed him off, and a week later, sonofabitch, I had an opening scene in my head.
Emma: [Slightly cackling laugh] And it begins...
Michelle: And, um- and it begins. So, I guess this all comes from the idea that, um, for this story - it’s called Etude - and, er, it’s based on the idea that, um, the reason why Edward has so many hang ups is because he just doesn’t realise that he ain’t straight, and I think that is the only explanation for Edward, frankly. [Emma laughs] So in canon Edward, um, was 17 years old when he was changed into a vampire, in the year 1918, because he had the flu. Which, you know, if you know anything about the pandemic flu, you know it kill yo’ ass. [Emma laughs] So this would have been, like I said, 1918, it’s a very, sort of, post Victorian mentality that the young man has and this supposedly influences his thinking about everything from sex to what people think, because he can read minds so therefore he is constantly pummelled by people’s thought processes. I decided to, er, play on that theme, so it’s basically your typical self-actualisation, self-realisation story in that regard, hence why it’s all a little bit long, and a little bit tortured, but I try to keep it moving along by interjecting lots of other sex into-
Emma: I like the way you say that: ‘interjecting other sex,’ and ... yeah, go on.
Michelle: I wrote it very slowly, and I hand-waved, um, quite a few things that I didn’t realise you either don’t have to, or maybe you should. Because it the first time I’d ever written anything that- well, let me back up - I had written a lime and a lemon, by lime, of course, I mean vagueish sexual content, or just not very explicit, and lemon: explicit, and those were in my work in progress stories, and then the next thing I wrote was, you know, a fairly explicit blowjob, and then a less explicit blowjob, and then a straight-up male/male/male threesome that involved spit-roasting Edward Cullen.
Emma: I think I wanna read that.
Michelle: Thank you. But, erm, no, it is pretty explicit and I got quite a lot of help from that young man, Bragi151.
Emma: So what are your goals in fandom? What are you working on now and where might you be headed. What other fandoms might you be interested in? Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
Michelle: [laughs] My big thing right now is to finish my current Work in Progress, which is called Sublimation, it’s a beast of a monster, it’s- it’s big. Currently 25 chapters long, topping 200,000 words. I’m basically re-writing, not to say that I’m writing Twilight, but I’ve completely veered it off in a different direction to make it work for me, and it seems to work for others as well, which is kind of nice. I always have ideas for one-shots, and I honestly believe that one-shots are heart of fanfiction, but the neat thing about the one-shot is that it can be anything you want it to be. It can be a story, like Etude is - my slash story - or it can be, you know, just that little moment that you want to capture. Maybe you just like the look of somebody in your mind, and you wanna fill that out, which is sort of what I did with the Harry Potter one-shot I wrote. And then after I finish up with maybe finishing this story, and then a short arc afterwards I’m kind of starting to get enamoured of other fandoms again. I think we discussed the possibility of me writing a Sherlock story.
Emma: [sing-songy] Yes! Yes, yes, yes!
Michelle: I am- I will be- I actually-
Emma: Sorry, let me just squee on this. This will be, this will be John/Sherlock, right? Am I right?
Michelle: Um, I like the bromance thing, not so much taking it to the explicit level, but I like the idea of maintaining sort of this odd-ball, like, ‘what the hell’s going on between you two?’ sort of a-
Emma: I’ll take it, I’ll take it. [laughs]
Michelle: For me, I don’t know, I guess I’m still hung up on the Granada series. I still have a hard time not seeing Jeremy Brett as Sherlock.
Emma: Aww. Aww.
Michelle: And- oh, I know, isn’t that sweet? Um,
Emma: It is.
Michelle: But I have to say that, erm, the new version of Sherlock Holmes really is striking. I’m looking forward to seeing the second season of episodes, who knows I might get some better ideas then.
Emma: Oh, when you watch series two, yeah. We’ve talked about this already.
Michelle: Yeah.
Emma: We’ll talk- we can talk about it more off-mic. But yes.
Michelle: [laughs] And I also kind of have an idea for doing more with Severus Snape. Er-
Emma: Ooh, nice.
Michelle: Yeah. Well he is one of my favourites. Or maybe Hermione. I don’t know if I could write a Snape/Hermione ship, it has to be handled so carefully for me to like it. And there’s only one author, well maybe two authors, I know of so far that do it how I like it. I also have some original fiction ideas as well, but fanfiction really is, it really frees you to do, sort of, character analysis and, and just fool around with someone else’s toys, which everybody knows you love to do.
Emma: Oh yeah, so much fun. And I think too, whenever I- whenever my husband says ‘you should do something you can make money at’, and I keep thinking, ‘but then I couldn’t be in fandom any more’. I mean, for me it’s about the people, and the community. It sounds like you have that too, that in the Twilight fandom as well you’ve got the sort of community, and these people-
Michelle: You do. You do.
Emma: Well, I think we can move on to the Final Questions. What is your favourite fic of all time?
Michelle: You know, it might not be a Twilight story. It might be a Harry Potter story.
Emma: Ohh, nice.
Michelle: Thank you. One of my absolute favourite writers is a lady named Aurette, and she writes a Snape/Hermione ship most of the time. There’s this, it’s a two shot, it’s really short, it’s called The Tattered Man. And it is really sad, it’s really tragic, it’s a variation on the Marriage Law fic, and it is just delicious. It’s just stunning, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back and read it.
Emma: Ohh, wow.
Michelle: My favourite parody is probably I Wanna Eff You Like a Masochistic Lion.
Emma: [laughs] That is the best title ever! Oh my God.
Michelle: And that’s not even the whole title! There was a- there’s a-
Emma: And it’s literl- it’s eff you it’s not fuck you? It’s Eff you?
Michelle: It’s E F F. There’s a line in Twilight, ‘and the lion laid down with the lamb’, it’s just an excerpt from the Bible. It’s as hard-core paradoy as they get. And it parodises not just Twilight, but fanfanfiction, an’, an’, an’ just typical things, from, you know ‘the heroine always has tiny hands’, type of stuff. It is just knock-down, drag out hilarious.
Emma: Fantastic.
Michelle: There is another, there is an excellent Twilight fanfiction called Becoming Bella Swan, it’s a brain bender, but it’s really neat.
Emma: Nice. Okay, cool. We’ll post those links, definitely. What about fan art?
Michelle: Funny you mention that. There is a- there’s actually great fanart in the Twilight world, both in terms of, like, banner making type of stuff, all the way to original art that is just stunning. So, one of my favourites is a lady by the name Nikitajuice, again this is coming from the Jacob Black side of the fandom - there’s fantastic art also from the vampire-centric side as well - but nikitajuice is probably best known for an image called Breaking Jacob, and it is this incredibly striking image of, it’s Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black, holding his chest and there is just blood leaking from around where his heart is. And it is...amazing. It’s a very, very striking image.
Emma: Oh, that’s lovely. So, what is your OTP, then?
Michelle: Okay, yeah, Jacob and Bella.
Emma: Jacob and Bella!
Michelle: Right so this, these two are, they were friends as children. Their dads are best friends. The thing about Jacob is that even when Bella was what I like to call water damaged, and scratched and dented after Edward left her in the second book. He still wants her even though she’s kind of messed up. And he kind of helps her come back to herself after being so damaged and so on. It’s just...he always liked her, and that never changed. And I can really respect that. And he gets angry on her behalf, as opposed to angry at her, or angry at the situation, he’s angry for her because of the situation she finds herself in. Um. At no time does he try to take away her ability to choose, um, Edward many times tells, Bella tells her that no, she can’t do something for her own good - which I think is remarkably insulting - Edward at one point actually disables her vehicle, so that she can’t go visit Jacob, who is her best friend in the story. If I had dated a guy like that my dad would have shot him.
Emma: Seriously.
Michelle: That’s actually a major reason why there is a Team Jacob presence, er, that’s so powerful and really fervent, because if you think about the behaviours that Edward displays in the story he’s hitting all the major stop signs-
Emma: Right.
Michelle: -for getting a restraining order. I mean, for Pete’s sake, in the first book he sneaks in her room to watch her sleep, what could be creepier than that?
Emma: [chuckles] Yeah. Oh my God. And I think that’s the thing I hear over and over, is that- a problem people have with Twilight is that if you just take the books at face value that it’s sending really bad messages to girls about what to expect from relationships.
Michelle: Right. And that actually leads into, you know, what the big tropes of Twilight are, and yeah that’s a major one. It’s like this- How is that okay? This is not love, this is hijacking. This is not healthy.
Emma: So what’s the best fee- piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten for something you’ve written?
Michelle: Early on I got some nice reviews, when I first started posting Sublimation, some folks made the comment ‘you’re going in the right direction, can you go a little further?’ They kind of encouraged me to push the concepts that I was already, sort of, fostering, and they encouraged me to go ahead and explore as far as I wanted to go. And I already kind of knew I was heading in that direction, but I was a little afraid of the idea, and I was very, very, self conscious early on, and that kind of shows in the writing actually, because, I think, as I became a little more confident the writing stopped being so much like Stephanie Meyer’s and took on a little bit more of the style that I tend to write in. I think as I’ve done that the story has improved. Overall my writing has improved. I think people just telling me that, no you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to tag everything, you don’t have to write like her - that first real lemon, the virgin sex scene, I actually got a lot of feedback from people who actually said wow, that was a really solid scene that was actually evocative of some very powerful emotion. And I was really kind of floored by that because I was really kind of terrified as hell to post that chapter.
Emma: Yeah.
Michelle: Yeah. Transformative moment there, when I hit the post button at fanfiction.net to post that chapter.
Emma: Yeah, no, that first sex scene, yeah, that’s, like, that notion of burying your head in the pillow, trying to ‘oh my god am I really going to really write this? And are other people going to read it?’
Michelle: ‘Please, God, don’t let my mother ever read this.’
Emma: Exactly. That’s... it’s, it’s fantastic.[Michelle laughs]That’s so cool. So what’s your fa- what’s your biggest kink, then, in fic? What’s the thing that you love to read?
Michelle: Well it’s a running joke that, you know, however you can kill Edward, um, [Emma laughs] is pretty entertaining. That’s actually just a running joke on how to do that. I like to read anything that breaks the tropes. Give me something original, that’s what I wanna see. I like seeing original stuff built in canon. I like sticking to the mostly canon world, because, well, that’s why I came here in the first place, so breaking these, these things that make us so crazy, or make us fall in love with it, or, you know, become our unifying themes. Breaking those apart I really enjoy. Not so much just for the sexual aspect, but take what we were given, and what brought us to our laptops at, you know, two o’clock in the morning, and show me how it can be done better.
Emma: What pairing have you never written that you would like to try?
Michelle: You know, when I first started reading Twilight fanfiction, the first idea I got was for Jasper and Bella. And I have in my mind this really awesome story that I first wanted to work on, but the other story took off faster. And it’s basically a Tarantino meets Twilight.
Emma: Oh, wow. [laughs]
Michelle: As whacky as that sounds, I mean, it is just nothing but graphic violence and revenge, it’s kind of like Kill Bill.
Emma: So what advice do you have for people who are starting out writing fanfic in, really in any fandom, but maybe in Twilight in particular, since that’s what we’re talking about?
Michelle: If you’re going to be writing fanfiction, it’s probably because you’ve been reading fanfiction. Pay attention to the names that people refer to. So if somebody has said that someone’s their beta, if somebody mentions that, hey this person did pre-reading for me, check out that person’s work. Check out the circle of people that you- that the writing you like, the things that you find you’re reading most often. And review. See if they respond, because the authors who respond are more likely to be favourable to the idea of maybe, kind of, fostering you under their wing, if that’s what you’re looking for, but the ultimate thing for anything you’re writing is write.
Emma: Absolutely.
Michelle: Write, write, write.
Emma: Yeah. Absolutely. And finally. What question do people never ask you that they wish they would?
Michelle: Since I am a Jacob writer, primarily, I wish someone from the Edward ship would ask me why I write Jacob. Just that very basic question, because I’m just not sure that we speak the same language sometimes. Yeah, it’s just like sometimes just don’t get each other, which is fine, you know, different ships. Just ask me why, ‘cause I wanna tell you why. Maybe I just want to point out why I think you’re crazy. I don’t know.
Emma: [laughs]Well I think that wraps us up for this discussion, thank you so much, Michelle for taking time-
Michelle: Sure.
Emma: - to come and talk to us about Twilight fandom and everything.
Michelle: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Emma: Oh it’s been fantastic. So as always, links to everything we’ve discussed will be posted on the slashcast LJ at slashcast.livejournal.com, and also on our website, and if you have any questions or comments for Michelle please leave them on the post-show-post. And that’s it for this episode, so we’ll see you next time, and happy slashing!
Transcribed by: angelbabe_cj