Summer 2007 Read Free

professional
interested in the kinds of storytelling they were doing over there, rather than
coming to prodom as a fanfiction writer with a past to justify.
    I think that gives me a novel perspective on the genre.
    If you will forgive me a small and terrible pun.
    (I did write a certain amount of what I would now
identify as fanfic in junior high, but it was in isolation, and I had no idea
that anybody else did that sort of thing. I thought of it as practice,
actually–I knew about spec scripts, and I knew about students repainting
masters to learn technique. I guess Denis McGrath has never heard about that,
or visited a major art museum and seen the baby artists with their easels
pitched in front of an old master, copying, copying, copying.
    (I think it was John Gardner who made his writing
students type out James Joyce’s “The Dead” repeatedly as an exercise, but
memory is fallible. In any case, I’m far from the only pro writer who writes
fanfic, although as far as I know I’m the only one who does it openly.)
    The interesting thing is that the reason I started writing fanfic was because there were properties that I wanted not to alter, but either
to parody or to talk about on a thematic level, and it was much easier to show
those things–to demonstrate them–than to talk about them. (I’ve
been writing about fanfic for a while: a large part of what I wanted to
do in One-Eyed Jack & the Suicide King is talk about narratives and
how they build on older narratives–well, that’s the whole gist of the
Promethean Age books, really: it’s all a snake eating its tail.)
    We are pattern-finding and story-telling animals. It’s
what we do. We take the real world and turn it into narratives and symbols so
our brains can manipulate them more easily. And once we have those narrative
symbols, if they suit our needs, we don’t stop manipulating them just
because somebody says, “well, you shouldn’t do that because it’s nasty.”
    Any more than, you know, the vast majority of people
ever stopped wanking because somebody told them it would make them go blind.
    Now, writers and creators are, indeed, possessive of
their creations. Which is natural. But fans are also possessive of the stories
that speak to them. And they don’t always have the same ideals or desires that
the creators do.
    I write stories to service my own narrative kinks. I am
deeply aware of those narrative kinks. Among them are: death or glory stands,
the cold realities of living with damage, people who are better than they have
to (even at great cost to themselves), the mythologization or valorization of
intellect, situations with no right answer–a comedy of ethics, as I’ve
heard it called–and situations that are both over-fraught and under-sold.
    This is stuff you will always find in my work. I
can’t help it. It’s my myths.
    And it’s the myths that show up in the work I love, as
well. They’re what I react to.
    It’s possible that if my hardcore narrative kink was gay
porn, I would be doing nothing but writing slash.
    The other thing I’m aware of in my own work is how
highly reactive and responsive it is. For pretty much everything I’ve written,
I can point you towards the ur-text that made me go, “No. That’s just not
right. ” The Jenny Casey novels are a reaction to a bunch of philosophical
issues I had with the science fiction of the seventies and eighties. Carnival
is what you get when you put a collection of unworkable Utopias in a box and
make them fight (am I the only person who reads Utopias and thinks, “That
sounds like hell?”), Blood & Iron is what happened when I read one
too many urban fantasies in which the Us vs. Them was clearly divided, and
clearly All Right-Thinking-People must agree with the Us… And let’s be honest, A
Companion to Wolves is what happens when you start really thinking about
the sexual and social dynamics in the Pern novels and their descendents, and
decide to take it on the nose with