I am completely
uninteresting. Really. I've never even been high (though I'm not saying
I didn't inhale). I've never smoked tobacco. I average under one drink
per month. This probably explains the perversity of my writing – all
that rebellious energy has to go somewhere. Personal history: I went to
school, did a lot of schoolwork, went to college, ditto, law school, you
got it. Policy debate was my obsession, and I still maintain it's the
best educational experience you can get. I clerked for a federal judge
and a Supreme Court justice, and now I am an overpaid intellectual
property lawyer with a wonderful husband and cat, planning on becoming a
less-well-paid law professor with same. My Buddha nature is to seek
clarification. I got into writing fanfic the way anyone does: a long
history of telling myself "what happened next," exposure to fanzines and
then the Internet, and the conclusion that I could do that at least
better than average. Samuel Johnson said that no one but a blockhead
ever wrote, except for money, but then again Johnson wrote diaries which
is a bit of a contradiction.
were Battlestar
Galactica, Wonder Woman, Knight Rider, and the Sime/Gen series by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg & later Jean Lorrah, who are also known for their
Star Trek fan fiction. I never wrote those stories down, though. That
waited until the X-Files. The first full episode I ever saw was Jose
Chung's From Outer Space, and subsequent viewing was a quest to repeat
the sublimity of that experience. I watched S8, and in retrospect I can
only say that I was sitting shiva for a dear departed friend. I watched
the very first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I was taping by
episode 3, recognizing the miracle of Joss. Unlike XF, BtVS characters
actually talk. The French have a phrase, I'm told, l'esprit d'escalier,
the spirit of the backstairs, which means the comeback or perfect bon
mot you think of after a conversation has finished. On Buffy, the
characters say those things. We should all have Joss writing our
dialogue.
Contrary to public expectations, I don't bite. But I do wear black on
the outside because black is how I feel on the inside. (I've always
wondered if Morrissey was deliberately invoking Hamlet there. I just saw
yet another production of Hamlet, whose guiding idea seemed to be that
Hamlet was a drama queen, which was why he chose such odd and slow
methods of revenging his father. This turns out to be a consistent,
justified interpretation of the text, and yet it was strangely
uninteresting, to the extent that Hamlet can be uninteresting. I think
it's because that interpretation is so consistent that it takes away
Hamlet's mystery. Also the actor shouted a lot, which I didn't like. I
would like to see a version of Hamlet played as, in part, a love
triangle between Laertes, Hamlet and Horatio, with Hamlet trying to
shift his desires to Ophelia as a substitute Laertes. So that's what's
going on with me.)