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youknowmymethods · 6 years ago

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Content Creator Interview #6

Hello again and welcome to our sixth interview. This time, it’s the turn of @ashockinglackofsatin to put @sunken-standard ‘s writing under the microscope. Together they chat about the early days of the Sherlock fandom, how music can influence writing, and why the I Love You scene helped end sunken’s own great hiatus.

For those who don’t know me: I am @ashockinglackofsatin on tumbr, satin_doll on AO3. My test subject...erm, sorry - interviewee - is the notorious sunken_standard, probably most famous for her two epic, novel-length stories Longer Than The Road That Stretches Out Ahead and Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, which can be found on AO3 (along with her other wonderful stories) and should be required reading for anyone aspiring to write fanfiction.

You should know, first off, that I’m crap at doing interviews, which I discovered years ago when I had to interview musicians and various personalities as a job. I didn’t last long at that job.

So here is Kat’s Idiotic Interview with @sunken-standard.

satin_doll: You’re very good at writing Sherlock’s emotional cluelessness without making him seem like an idiot or an ass. Can you talk a little about the way you see Sherlock’s character that allows you to do this?

sunken_standard: Thank you :D So the answer to this is going to carry through to some of the other questions, but basically, I write Sherlock as a version of myself. I feel a kinship with the character, a highly intelligent person surrounded by idiots and so, so frustrated by it, but even more frustrated by his own brain and the inability to control it. Probably autistic, just like I'm probably autistic (and I don't want to get into it but I'm not trying to co-opt an identity here or anything; I've tried to get a diagnosis and found out that's just not possible with my current healthcare options).

Anyway, one of my probably-autistic things is being hyper-aware of other people's emotions, but also having trouble identifying them and the appropriate responses. At times I do lack empathy, like I honestly can't understand why someone is feeling what they're feeling because I wouldn't feel that way in the same situation and it doesn't make sense. Sometimes I can empathize so much that it's overwhelming and I just kind of short-circuit, especially when it comes to grief or loss, and I end up being insensitive or just not saying or doing what a normal person would.

So basically, I approach his responses to other people's emotions the way I would my own, only stripped of female socialization and self-awareness.

satin_doll: How much do you draw on your own life and experiences in your fics?

sunken_standard: For scenarios and specific scenes, not a lot. For emotional and sensory experiences, more. I haven't done very much or lived to my full potential, so it's not a very deep well on either account. Every now and then anecdotes or details creep in (like Mars Cheese Castle and the “call me Daddy” during sex thing [which, for the record, was skeevy as fuck irl]), but most of it just comes from nowhere or stuff I saw on TV.

satin_doll: Both “Longer than the Road…” and “Fumbling Toward Ecstasy” are novel length stories. “Road”, however, is written without breaks/chapters. Did you ever consider breaking it up into parts or chapters? How hard was it to keep it all in one piece and how long did it take you to finish it?

sunken_standard: When I write, I usually just start and then go 'til it's done or I burn out. I got through three or four chapters' worth of FTE (and was on the verge of giving up until maybe_amanda convinced me not to). Since the story wasn't nearly finished and I wanted to start putting it out into the world (mostly because I have no patience, but also because I knew there was a window to stay relevant and a large number of people were looking for a longer, meatier [cough] post-TFP fic), I decided to start posting what I had and just write as I went because I was, in hindsight, probably hypomanic and I was keeping a good pace at that point.

I dunno, I think there was a lot more of that long-format thing happening in fic back then, where you'd have a 40k piece that only had breaks because of the word limit per post on LJ.

As far as how long it took, I don't remember. I know I started it February of that year and had probably a good 75% of it finished (all written at a tear, over the course of probably ten days or so, because when I was still smoking actual cigarettes I could and did do 3-5k words/ day), but then I dropped it and went on to try other ideas. I went back to it when those other stories fizzled, and I finished it in maybe another 2-3 weeks with editing and beta reading. I had some real problems with the ending and it was never good enough for me, but I just got to a point where I was sick of it and it was good enough.

So basically, it's harder for me to work in chapters than it is one long piece. There's more discipline to a chaptered work; each chapter is its own story, in a way, and each one needs to end on a certain kind of beat. I still don't feel like I have a knack for it, and I think if I did anything long like that again I'd have to write most of it without breaks and then shoehorn them in where I could later on.

satin_doll: You took a long hiatus from Sherlock fic after S2, and came back for S4. What was it about S4 that sparked your writing again?

sunken_standard: I don't really know. I mean, the ILY was a big thing, but I think S4 gave me more to work with for the kind of things I write (all the angst and inner monologue) than S3 or TAB. I had mixed feelings about S3. I didn't like Mary much for a long time because she was one of Moffat's women (and anyone who's seen my tumblr knows how I feel about that), but I finally unclenched after a while because I like Amanda Abbington a lot and Mary was preferable to Sarah Sawyer (who I'm more ambiguous about now, but really didn't like for a long time because there was something about her that I read as smarmy, though now I see her reactions as more subtly uncomfortable and kind of like “what's going on/ this is weird/ John's a nice guy but is everything around him always this weird?”). Anyway.

I did try writing a bit after S3, but I never finished any of it; I didn't really feel like there was a place in the fandom or much of a community at that time, either—at least, not like what I had been used to from the early days. The tribe that existed wasn't my tribe (any of them). I think I need a certain degree of shared enthusiasm to motivate me to keep writing. Like, I have a lot of ideas for fic in other fandoms, but they're dead or never existed in the first place. And I know I'll have some audience for the small fandoms and people will read and kudos and everything, but there's no one around to geek out with or bounce ideas off of, so it just isn't as appealing. If I'm going to be miserable and alone while writing something, it's going to be something I can at least make money off of, y'know?

satin_doll: Do you edit as you go or finish the story first and go back over it to edit?

sunken_standard: Edit as I go. When I get stuck, I break that cardinal rule of writing and go back over what I've written and nit-pick it to death. It's a bad habit, but at the same time, small changes have led to big developments in the course of the story later on. I mean, I think sometimes this is why I have so many unfinished things, but I've tried just writing through and that doesn't work for me either. Once I get to the end of something, I've already made most of big cuts and done a lot of the reworking, so the beta polishing isn't as labor-intensive. I'm one of those people that when I feel like something's finished, I don't want to have to go back to it again. And if I didn't edit as I went, it would kind of feel like redoing the whole story and that's extremely unappealing to me. It's kind of like baking—it's always better if you clean as you go, rather than waiting until the cake's out of the oven to do the dishes and put stuff away (which I do when I'm low on spoons, but it ends up seeming like double the work).

satin_doll: Do you proof it yourself or rely on someone else to proofread it for you? I’m talking technical details here, proofing as opposed to simple beta reading.

sunken_standard: Mostly proof myself, since I edit as I go (and proofing is inevitably part of that when the mistakes just jump out). My beta catches everything else (and she's amazing; I misuse words and just legit don't know spelling differences for a lot of things [stationary vs stationery] and I'm not great with grammar and prepositions because I'm an ignorant fucker with no education).

satin_doll: When did you first start writing? When did you first discover that you COULD write?

sunken_standard: I remember writing stories as a kid, but I burned them all when I was a teenager so I don't even know what most were about or anything. I do remember that I wrote one when I was in like 4th or 5th grade that was ST:TNG self-insert fanfic and I think the plot was me working with Data to bring Lal back. I know it was Data, because I had a huge crush on him as a kid. I really thought I could grow up to write ST:TNG novels at that point.

And as for CAN write—jury's still out on that one. Ask my 12th grade English teacher, who laughed in my face when I told him I was thinking of pursuing English so I could be a writer. But before that, I had some other teachers that used to give me A+s on my creative writing assignments (despite all the spelling and grammatical errors). In 11th grade, I had a really great teacher, Mr. Lansing, who turned me on to the good parts of American lit and really encouraged me to read (and write) what I liked, not just what other people told me I had to. He encouraged me when I applied for the Governer's school, too. (The Governer's School is this program in PA for kids who excel; it's like a summer camp for the elite nerds. They have a bunch of them, each for different areas—math, science, medicine, I think one that's like history/ government/ civics, and then one for the arts. For creative writing, they take a total of 20 kids—10 for poetry and 10 for prose. I tried for the poetry category and made the first round of cuts and went for a regional interview (with about 50 other kids, so like maybe 150 kids state-wide); long story short I didn't make it. I was the first alternate, meaning if somebody couldn't attend, I would get their spot. #11 out of 10. I was so crushed, because it basically reinforced what I'd been told by other people—I was a big fish in pond too small to even piss in and there were always going to be people better than me. I was already mostly checked-out when it came to academia and aspirations; after that there was just really no point to keep going.)

Anyway though, I did write bits and pieces here and there even after school, thinking one day I'd get my shit together and write my own Confederacy of Dunces and then off myself (it's still a viable plan). Then, in 2008 I was recently unemployed and everything in life was shitty, so I wrote a big happy-ending fic for The Doctor and Rose. It was kind of the right bit of media at the right time that inspired me. More about that later though.

satin_doll: What/who do you think has had the biggest influence on the development of your style?

sunken_standard: I've been asked this before, and I always feel like I'm a little pretentious and I trot out the same names (both fanfic authors and book authors), but I had a realization a while ago that I'm always missing one person—Vonnegut. I think he's got this kind of no-bullshit way of saying things that still manages to be poetic and delicate and that's what I most aspire to.

I think a lot of my style is influenced by film, too. Some influences are probably Todd Solondz, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, and John Waters, as far as the way I approach the reality within the story. I think I tend to focus on a lot of the same things—the weird, the mundane, the mildly uncomfortable—but I don't go nearly as far in any direction. I think even the way I string scenes together and the shifting of focus within my scenes between action, dialogue, and inner monologue are influenced by cinematography. I always say I'm just transcribing the movie in my head, so I mean, there's bound to be some kind of influence.

satin_doll: You’re noted for the banter between your characters, humorous and otherwise. Do you have rules/profiles for characters that establish their voices for you? Are there things, for example, that you think Sherlock or Molly simply would never say/do or would always say/do? How structured are these characters in your head when you start writing?

sunken_standard: It varies slightly from story to story/ universe to universe, but I think I have patterns for the banter (and I have a different set for Sherlock and John, and Sherlock and Mycroft, but there are common threads throughout). As for comedy, it's not quite straight man/ funny man, but I tend to default to Sherlock being more literal and deadpan and Molly being more expressive and emotive. I use the scraps of the dynamic the show's given us and just build on that. It's kind of formulaic, actually: Sherlock does a not-good thing (degree of severity varies), Molly reacts with a blend of annoyance and amusement while going along for the ride.

I have a kind of mental file for things I think would be out of character for each of them, but sometimes I like to try to find a way to get to one of those things and slip it into a fic organically. One of the reason I liked doing the one-line prompt fics so much was that so many of them could easily have been intros to the kind of fluff that makes me gag; I'm no fool, though, and I love me some low-hanging fruit, so I just adjust it to my tastes. I'm a never-say-never kinda gal. Mostly.

That being said, there are a lot of things that I think would take a lot of doing to make them be in-character. I don't think they'd ever use pet names for each other unless it was through gritted teeth or with at least a bit of irony (like how I used “yes, dear,” in FTE, and I think in some of the universes in Ficlet Cemetery). I can't see Sherlock ever doing housework unless it was for a case (though dishes and sanitizing surfaces are an exception, because both those chores are tangent to the kind of cleaning up after oneself one does in a lab setting, and imo that fits with his logic). I can't see him being very affectionate in public, except under rare circumstances when he might do an arm around the shoulders or a guiding palm to the small of the back.

And as for structure, I think they all start with the same scaffolding, but in every new universe they get draped slightly differently according to variations in backstory or tone or genre or whatever. Or like, they're already sculpted, but the lighting changes. I think that as I write, they take on different nuances and acquire more depth, though. Like it wasn't really until a few chapters in to FTE that I got a fuller picture of the Molly I was writing, even though I had the rough idea of her backstory from pretty much the beginning. Same with Longer Than the Road, too. As I come up with details of someone's past, I experience those scenarios and it makes me rethink and fine-tune everything about them in what I've already written, and adds more texture as I keep going.

satin_doll: You’ve listed a playlist for “Longer than the Road…” Do you write to music? How much does music inspire your writing? Does every story have a playlist?

sunken_standard: It's funny, but I don't listen to music nearly as much as I did even 5 years ago. Not sure why, honestly, maybe something to do with my mental health and overstimulation? So I don't write to music much anymore. Not every story has a playlist or songs attached (I don't think any of the FC stuff does, at least not in any significant way), but it seems like my best work is inspired by music in some way.

FTE didn't really have a soundtrack, but I listened to a lot of the music I had in common with the version of Molly that I was writing—very 90s alternative and pop rock. Lots of Pulp (which I picked as Molly's favorite band because I think they're Loo's favorite, or one of her favorites). For the proposal, I had “Dreams” by The Cranberries on a loop as I wrote. There's just something musically about that song that's full of anticipation and the wavy kind of guitar (I don't know the music terms and it's been so many years since I was into anything instrument-related that I'm not even sure how the sound is made, like a whammy bar or wiggling their fingers on the frets or whatever but anyway) just has this kind of wavering emotion that makes it feel like it's on the cusp of something. And also it's the big romance song from every coming-of-age thing ever, and so just hearing it is like an auditory shorthand for breathless, adventurous romance, at least for women of a certain age (namely, my age, and I'm only a year younger than Loo/ Molly). There was another scene—I can't remember what it was without rereading the fic—that I spent like three days listening to nothing but “The Way” by Fastball. It might have been the thing with the drink testing and then the sex on the sofa and the cake baking. (As an aside, I just started listening to the song and immediately got hit with a sense memory of night-wet spring air blowing in my window, because that's what the weather was when I was writing to this and it gives me a weird yearning pull in the back of my throat, like nostalgia almost but something else in it. Like, did you ever hear a pop song that taps into some deeper part of the human experience, both musically and lyrically, and you just feel like there's some universal truth in it that's too much to totally grasp? That's how I feel about both of those songs. Anyway.)

Another story that had a few songs attached was Stainless, Captive Bead. Radiohead's “Creep” was what they were listening to in the tattoo parlor, and a lot of the sex bits were written while listening to Nine Inch Nails' “Closer” (look, if it's set in the 90s and there's fucking in it, I'm going to find a way to relate it to “Closer,” because that song is just dark sex and angst set to synthesizers and a high hat).

Also, sometimes when I write I listen to ambient noise stuff, cityscapes or rain or whatever fits the tone of the piece and my mood. I can't listen to anything for too long, though, because I get listener fatigue and I burn out faster.

satin_doll: Have you ever considered self-publishing your stories as a book or series of books?

sunken_standard: I've tried to file off the serial numbers on the Girlfriend series, but it was harder than I thought it would be so I back-burnered it. I still like to think that one day I will, it's a life goal, but if I put too much pressure on myself I only make it worse and nothing gets done.

satin_doll: You seem to have a detailed backstory for every character in your stories, from Janine to Molly’s mother. Do you work these out beforehand or do they just happen in your head as you write?

sunken_standard: Both? I kind of touched on it earlier, but I usually have an idea of the backstory, the bones at least, and then as I write it gets richer. I have multiple headcanons for every character, so I just start off with one of those. Like I have five different families for Molly, all things I was coming up with when I was writing other stories. Hell, I've got like five different Uncle Rudys (most of them highly unpleasant and most likely triggering).

I have a habit of just sitting and thinking about a character, like “what would make them this way?” armchair psychoanalysis stuff. And if I can establish a plausible-sounding backstory, I have a better foundation for introducing non-canonical traits or details. I think that's the downfall of a lot of fic authors—they just write a canon character as they would an OC and expect us to play along without demonstrating any internal logic. Maybe I'm just picky; there's certainly an element of that, too.

satin_doll: How detailed is the story in your mind before you start writing it? Do you work from plans and outlines with every story?

sunken_standard: It all depends on the story. Sometimes I have a whole series of detailed scenes just waiting in my head to be written out. Sometimes I only have one thing and I just keep going. I say I use an outline, but it's not a proper outline. More like a collection of notes and bullet points of what I want to happen and what kind of beats I want to hit. I usually keep it at the bottom of my working document so I don't have to switch to another doc to look at it if I need to.

satin_doll: Where does a story begin with you? What constitutes the “urge” to write? You once mentioned (in a comment reply I think) that you know the ending of the story first and then write the rest of the story to get there. What do you do when a story goes off track? How do you get it back to the way you planned it, or do you even try to do that?

sunken_standard: (I don't know why my document formatting went tits-up here, so I'll answer 1 & 2 both here)

So stories are a visceral kind of thing. I always have ideas. Seriously, give me a theme or a title or something and I can spit out a summary and details in as long as it takes to type it out. But actually crafting prose (can I sound more pompous?) is best likened to the urge to poop. Classy, right? I said it was visceral. Really though, it's that same kind of state of heightened awareness/ arousal (in the strictest medical sense of the word, not sexual arousal), something is happening and if it doesn't things are going to get weird and I'm going to be very uncomfortable for a very long time. Also, like pooping, if it's not ready, no amount of grunting or straining is going to make it happen, and it might even make it worse in the long run. As you can tell, I've been very, very constipated for the last year.

Anyway.

Stories going off track... a lot of the time I just let it happen because it's taking me to a better place than where I thought it was going to end up.

satin_doll: Quote from you: “I spend way too much time thinking about who Molly is as a person. Writing porn and comedy both have their appeal, but I really like sitting down and thinking about what makes any given character tick and how they might feel about what's happening around them. 30s and single has so much baggage to it, even if all the women's magazine articles and whatever-wave-we're-up-to-now feminist thought pieces say it's a myth or a stereotype or whatever. It's a truth we don't want to be true because it's not fair. I mean, it's not the thing that solely defines any woman, but it's there, just like cellulite and brand new and worrying moles and our favorite brand of whatever suddenly being discontinued (or significantly changed) because some marketing person decided it was too 'old.' But anyway, such is life. And I like putting that in fic.”

Do you write character studies to use as a reference for your stories, or just wing it for each individual piece?

sunken_standard: The character study is dead, isn't it? Like, as standalone fic. Never see them anymore, which is a real pity. I used to write them (or, well, start them, heh) before I took a break from writing/ fandom, mostly to try to get some of my headcanons down in some kind of usable way. But I haven't really written a character study (in prose, at least) since 2012 or so.

So when I write, I keep two documents open—the working copy that's a first-through-final draft and a “notes/ cut bits/ things to work in somehow” document. In the notes document I usually keep any character details (backstory or how I want them to react to something later, whatever). There are themes I go back to over and over, like a cluster of traits I reuse in some fashion because I think they fit the character (Mycroft and disordered eating, Molly as a middle child in some fashion, John as the child of alcoholics, etc.), so a lot of that just lives in my head. Any bits of characterization specific to a story go in the notes doc for that story, while any generic thoughts or something that I think I might want to use later gets stuck in another document full of random ideas, snippets of dialogue, jokes, AUs I'll never write, that kind of thing. I've got a few of those docs from different writing periods. They're mostly just a way to externalize a thought so I don't lose it; I hardly ever go back to them for anything.

satin_doll: What was your first involvement with fanfiction? Where did it all start?

sunken_standard: I started to answer this in another question; basically, fanfic's been in my wheelhouse in one way or another since I was a kid (Star Trek novels are fanfic, period). I discovered fanfiction back in the days of eXcite searches and webrings while looking for translations of Inu Yasha manga scans; I stumbled upon an English-language fancomic/ doujinshi called Hero in the 21st Century and it was so well-written, funny and poignant and well-researched I was just drawn in. I still think about it and the author's other works to this day. I did pick at the idea of writing myself, sometimes even put down scenes or outlines and did hours of research, but never did the thing.

And then, in 2008, the stars aligned and I started a thing. Journey's End spawned a ton of Doctor Who fic, and that was good, because I could just kind of slip mine in there and I probably wouldn't get a lot of criticism or attention. So I wrote like two chapters without any idea of how it was going to end, and I submitted it to Teaspoon and an Open Mind (which was the Doctor Who fic archive at the time; it was curated/ moderated and where you went when you wanted to read something you knew would be good, or at least conform to certain standards, unlike The Pit [which is still garbage today]). And I got rejected. My grammar and spelling were awful (I didn't even have spell-check in whatever program I was using) and they said the whole thing had good bones, but I really needed to work on the English before they'd look at it again. Getcherself a beta, they suggested, and I think they had a forum where writers and betas could connect. So I got myself a beta and she stuck with me for like 30 chapters, answering questions and keeping my characterization on-track and basically re-teaching me the rules of written English. I tried to email her a few years ago to thank her again, but her email bounced back. Her name was Julia and if she sees this, thank you Julia. You're a wonderful person.

Anyway, I wrote lots in that fic universe for like 2 months, then got another job and tapered off. I abandoned it completely after a year. Life got in the way of a lot of things, and the next time I was really inspired to write anything was a couple years later, for Supernatural. I only put it on my LJ, never posted to a community or anything, and no one read it. Literally, I don't think the post got any hits at all and for sure no one commented. I sometimes think about putting it on AO3 just because. And then Sherlock happened and here we are.

satin_doll: Do you think writing fanfic has hurt or hindered your original work? Why or why not? (that looks like a high school test question - sorry!)

sunken_standard: Lol @ test question :D

I'm not really sure, tbh. On one hand, I only have so much creative energy—it's definitely a finite resource, and a scarce one—and devoting it to fanfic diverts it from any original work. On the other hand, all writing is practice. The only way to improve is to keep doing, no matter what it is. So in that sense, fanfic's certainly helped me to find a comfortable voice and a prose style that works for me. There are still problems to solve, figuring out the best approach to a scene or story from a technical standpoint (stuff like tense and perspective and all that), so I'm always learning something as I go. Mixed bag, really.

satin_doll: What was it about the Sherlock/Molly dynamic that got you started on a piece like “Longer Than the Road…” What did you see there that made you want to explore it in such detail?

sunken_standard: So I always talk about how Sustain was my come-to-Jesus moment with Sherlock and Molly. Here's something I've never told anybody, not even maybe_amanda (because I was kind of ashamed, but not for the reasons people might think): before ever reading Sustain, I started a story that was Sherlock/ John and Sherlock/ Molly. I had it roughly outlined and a few pages written, but I just kind of lost the feeling of it and it was starting to get problematic for character motivations, yada yada, so into the scrap heap it went. It had a passing similarity to Sustain because of a platonic-sex-for-pregnancy element (hence why I never talked about it), but the major difference was that it was going to end up as a kind of polyamorous arrangement, Sherlock loving both of them and having a kind of co-parenting triad. In mine, John wanted a baby, and Molly wanted her own baby, and Sherlock thought “best of both worlds!” and why do IVF when you can write awkward angst-fucking instead. But yeah, I never finished it.

Anyway, I always saw something there, but I couldn't make it work in a way that was consistent with my own characterization of Sherlock until after Series 2. Even in Series 1, he looks at her with a kind of fondness and a sort of bewilderment that just lends itself to nerds in love. At the time (and even now, tbh), I kind of attributed that to BC having a crush on Loo (and oh man do I have theories, which are gossipy and gross and not the kind of thing I usually even bother having opinions about, but have you listened to the S1 commentary and some of the interviews around that time? there's something more there) and that kind of just spilling over onscreen and it working for the editor because it makes BC look sexy.

I mean look, I make no secret of the fact I started off shipping Sherlock with John almost exclusively (though I'd read just about anything), and after S1 aired it was just a different time. I get really annoyed when people talk shit about the pairing and the people who still ship them, because most of them weren't even in the fandom at the time and didn't have the same experience as the OGs. When Series 1 aired, hardly anyone knew who BC was, and Martin was just the guy from The Office and some other shows that were kind of unremarkable; most of the fandom was composed of old-school ACD Sherlockians and a few stragglers (like me) that got there from Doctor Who or were just general mystery/ thriller fans that got sucked in. We had a different perception of it because we weren't led into it by Star Trek or Hobbits or MCU; the characters didn't have that baggage attached for us. A lot of us already had a perception of Holmes and Watson as some shade of gay, so it was no great leap to see the very obvious romance (and yes, they all called it that in interviews at the time) onscreen as a romantic one. Martin, when asked, said basically that he'd play the next series (S2) however they wrote it, and if romance was there he'd go down that road. Whatever, I don't need to defend it because people think what they think anyway.

Anyway, getting back to the actual question instead of a million tangents and rants, I think I saw a lot of the things that have since become like backbone tropes of the pairing (even in canon, with the whole “alone, practical about death” thing). Their interactions in S2 were great; everything hinted at more than what was on-screen. And I really liked the idea of exploring the dynamic that was pretty much already there, as far as Molly having both a crush and self-respect and Sherlock suddenly having to rely on this person (that he picked because she was reliable to begin with) who's a friend, but also kind of a stranger in the way that a lot of the people we consider friends are (at least, friends made in adulthood; work-friends, church-friends, club-friends, gym-friends). Past that, I really saw the potential for character growth stemming from their interactions, but not like her humanizing him or whatever; both of them gaining insight about themselves, with the other person (and their relationship) as a vehicle for those realizations. I think I could have done better on that front, but hindsight blah blah.

satin_doll: How familiar were you with the Sherlock Holmes character before the BBC series aired, and what made you want to write about him?

sunken_standard: So I wasn't very familiar at all. Just what was in the general cultural lexicon, maybe a few episodes of the Granada series on PBS as a kid, a few of the stories that I just couldn't get into when I tried to read them because I hate Victorian prose (hate it, everything about it, I won't read anything written before 1920 or so because I just hate it [Wilde being the singular exception, but I even get bogged down by him]). Oh, and the RDJ movie, which wasn't really Sherlock Holmes to me, but just like a Victorian-era action movie. After S1, I just devoured canon (though, full disclosure, I still haven't read all of it, probably only about 80%), then moved on to other adaptations and canon-era fic and pastiches, read a bunch of extra-canon material on the internet. So as far as that goes, I'm very much a poseur and newbie in the greater Sherlock Holmes fandom. At least I did my research?

Anyway, it really took the modern adaptation and BC's performance to make the character resonate with me. The aspects he chose to play up—the frustration and impatience and frantic mental energy—just hit a nerve. He really channeled the “gifted” experience (which I suspect was just a lot of BC himself bleeding through). Finally I could use a fictional character to bemoan how stupid everyone around me was and sound like a complete asshole and be completely in-character! The heavens smiled upon me.

Really though, I was initially attracted to how cerebral it was and how smart the fandom was overall. It was the early fandom (and I mean early, like days after episode 1 aired) that drew me in, at least to a participatory (vs. consumptive) level. Lots of very clever, very educated, very queer people having these deep, insightful discussions about everything (sometimes only tangentially related to the show). When I did start writing, I didn't have to dumb anything down; the challenge was to sound smarter than I actually am. And, I mean, I got to dredge up a lot of my own emotional baggage from being a perpetual outsider, which is always cathartic (and probably not very healthy, long-term, because it's not resolving anything, just exploiting myself, but that's a can of worms).

satin_doll: Are you more drawn to Sherlock or Molly as a character, or both equally? Why?

sunken_standard: Sherlock, I think, for the reasons described in the last question.

I don't generally identify with female characters in fiction, since my own identification as female is tenuous (and in general they're poorly written and poorly realized, but that's another story). I mean, I can draw from my own experiences as a (mostly) female-shaped person with female socialization, but I have a hard time intuiting feminine and it's harder for me to write a “normal” woman.

Paraphrasing something I read in an interview with another fic author I admire, writing a woman is always a self-portrait, and how much of yourself do you really want to reveal? Since I don't know how to woman correctly, I'm always afraid I'm going to slip up and hit the wrong beat for what a normal woman is and end up ruining the characterization. I do manage to channel a lot of my own frustrations with men, relationships, being a single and childless woman over 30, and the patriarchy into Molly's character, though.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I really love Molly (and always have—I was one of the first to use her as a main character and not just a punching bag or a punchline). I love her sense of humor and her job and her fashion sense, all of it. She's not one-dimensional. It's just easier for me to write Sherlock than it is to make decisions about who Molly is.

satin_doll: You are “internet famous” for Longer Than the Road (rightfully so!) What about that story do you think is so affecting for fans? How has “Road” influenced subsequent work you’ve done in the Sherlolly ship?

sunken_standard: You know, I'm really not sure why it seems to resonate with people. Maybe the homesickness or the exhaustion that comes with impermanence (and I mean, we all feel that on an existential level, everything's always changing and it's faster every year, just existing is like trying to walk in an earthquake). Or the healing/ recovery aspect of it (I tried to balance both sides, the affected and the caregiver). Or maybe I just wrote it at the right time (when there wasn't much else out there) and people kept coming back to it because it was familiar.

As for how it's influenced subsequent work... I'm sure it has, but I don't know how, exactly. I still think it's the best thing I've ever written and the closest to something literary I'll ever get, so in a way it's an albatross (no one ever wants to be reminded that they already peaked). I get frustrated when my newer work doesn't live up to the standard I set for myself with it. That frustration doesn't make me a better writer, it just makes me tired, so everything I do now is paler.

One thing it did do was cement my characterizations of Sherlock and Molly and the dynamic between them. I tend to write them a certain way and don't deviate from that, and that all has roots in the push-pull, love-hate thing I established in Longer Than the Road. I can't write Molly without a degree of contempt for Sherlock and I can't write Sherlock without a degree of shame and contrition in his feelings toward Molly.

satin_doll: How does feedback affect what you write? How important is it? Is it more important that a reader “get” the point of the work or just that they like it? What kind of reader do you write for?

sunken_standard: I try not to let feedback affect my writing. I mean, I only get positive feedback, really, so it's a high. I'm not trying to brag or anything; I count myself lucky that I don't get the shit others do (though I honestly think anybody that posts on The Pit is opening themselves up to it because it's a garbage dump, but I've never liked the site, so). I try not to let it go to my head or anything though.

I also try not to let it influence the direction my writing takes; I might do a comment fic or write a silly HC or something, but I like to keep my substantial pieces pure, so to speak. Though sometimes a comment sparks something and a whole other fic grows out of it, so I fail there, I guess. Sometimes it's a lot of pressure when people say they want to see more of something, or want me to write a kind of specific scenario, so I usually just don't, and then I feel bad about not giving nice people what they want and it starts this whole weird spiral of guilt and obligation and then swinging the other way and getting (internally) belligerent over not owing anybody anything. I uh, have a complicated relationship with my work being acknowledged in any capacity.

As for people “getting” it... I don't know if they really do or not. Sometimes I get comments and I can tell they're definitely on my wavelength and they picked up on an allusion or a detail or just saw or felt everything in the scene like I did when I was laying it out. Once in a while I get a comment that has a different interpretation than what I was trying to get across, and that's really cool because it makes me re-examine my own work and see it from a different perspective (which I think makes me stronger for the next thing). It's really validating when someone “gets” it, but at the same time, I write to entertain other people (as well as myself), so as long as they like it, I feel accomplished.

It's cliché, but I write for an audience of one. I've tried to write outside my taste and it doesn't end well. Sometimes I write tropes that aren't my bag (like the Wiggins “the Missus” thing, or kidfic/ pregnancy), but it's kind of like a nod and wink to people who do like it, rather than outright pandering. At least, that's what I tell myself. Sometimes you need to try on every bra in your size, even the ones you know you hate, just to make sure you're getting the right one, y'know?

satin_doll: Do you think fanfic has changed since you began writing it? If so, how?

sunken_standard: Yeah, but I don't think it's a good or bad thing. And it depends on where you look and what you consume.

In the last like five years, Tumblr's purity culture has shamed a lot of kink back into the closet, I think, and people (in my fandoms, at least) aren't really writing on the edge. I see darkfic, but it's about as dark as the night sky over Hong Kong. I think people are afraid to go really dark anymore because they don't want the backlash from a generation fed on a diet of pink princesses and promise rings. And I think everyone's desire for happy-ending escapism has ratcheted up because the real world is shit and TV shows are all playing Russian roulette with surprise deaths to add drama (thanks, The Walking Dead, for making that element so ubiquitous that the rest of the mainstream picked it up and ran).

On the other hand, I'm not seeing near the amount of badfic as I used to. It was never as much of a problem on the old platforms and AO3 (compared to The Pit), but there were always some. I mean, there are still lots of turds out there, but they all seem a bit more polished these days. As far as the English goes, at least. Maybe my fandoms are just maturing.

I think people interact a lot differently now, too. This is going to kind of tie into the next question, but the types of feedback are different now and I think authors have changed what and how they produce to kind of chase the dragon of positive feedback. Like, when I started, most public archives (read: not just one author's own website with all their fic, like you found in webrings a lot)—both completely open and curated—had some way to submit comments and allowed author replies. There was really no other way to let an author know you liked their work. I mean, some sites tracked numbers for bookmarking features or hit counts, but those weren't as... active(? I guess), they weren't really participatory for the reader.

Then AO3 came along and started the kudos thing (which people still bitch about because they think they get fewer comments; like be happy you get anything, ya fuckin' ingrates). Kudos count became a de facto rating system, thanks to the sort feature. Whenever I start reading for a new fandom, I pick a pairing, pick a rating, and sort by kudos. Sure, popularity isn't the best way to find good fic, but in any decent-sized fandom you can assume that the stuff on the first page is going to be written to a minimum standard. Anyway, one of the ways to game the system a bit on kudos is to do a multichapter fic; I've seen works that are like 80+ 200-word chapters (don't get me started on omnibus fic across fandoms). They aren't the best fic by far, but they pick up kudos every chapter, often from guests that are just people not signed in or on a different device. I'm not knocking it, exactly, since it front-paged me for more than one fic. Part of me still feels like it's disingenuous, but I also recognize that I should pull the stick out of my ass. Anyway, the kudos count was kind of the death of the one-shot longfic (which, when I wrote Longer Than the Road, was a pretty common format).

And now, it seems like the Tumblr fic culture is writing ficlets (under 1k words) and posting without a beta (and I do it too). Fic consumption has become a social activity. Reblogs aren't always about one's personal taste, they're a social signal of group affiliation. If you don't reblog certain things, you're suspect and given a wide berth. Woe betide the poor fucker that crosses party lines and posts one of the verboten ships. And I mean, this isn't just one fandom, I've seen complaints about it from all corners—Supernatural, Star Wars, MCU, Steven Universe ffs. I think when you have predominantly female spaces, you're always going to have an element of Mean Girl culture, y'know? I'm probably going to get my fingernails pulled out for being misogynistic or some kind of -phobic for saying that.

Whatever. It's true that a kind of hive-mind develops and all kinds of tropes and HCs get repeated until they become fanon. I mean, that kind of thing's always happened, but the whole culture of Tumblr forces you to identify yourself and your group affiliation by what fanon you subscribe to, probably because it's harder to find your tribe without dedicated community spaces like LJ had. With Tumblr, you basically have to trawl tags until you find your echo chamber.

I'm old and I fear change.

Tumblr ain't all bad, though. It's very collaborative, kind of like the old-school round-robin fic people used to do. Authors and artists riff off each other and a lot of really cool stuff comes out of these casual collaborations. And I do like the prompt lists; I remember kinkmemes and prompting communities back on LJ, but it feels more off-the-cuff and spontaneous to just give someone a numbered list and let them roll the dice for you.

You know what else has changed? We're kind of in a new era of epistolary storytelling with memes and shitposts; stories emerge that aren't prose (though might contain a prose element). I mean, people did mixed-media epistolary in 2008, but it was a lot harder then (create graphic, hand-code into text piece, hand-code all the italics and bolding and font changes to denote various media types, if you're really a wizard add in-line text links to audio clips to add ambiance). It's a lot easier to add a new thing on each reblog now, like someone does a video, followed by a 3-panel comic sketch, followed by a ficlet, and then a gif, you get the idea. I like it; it's just a shame that it's so ephemeral. Maybe that's part of the charm, though.

satin_doll: You’ve talked a bit about your experience with LiveJournal in the “old days”; what other platforms have you used in the past? Which ones did you like best?

sunken_standard: I went into it a little in another question, but I first posted fic to A Teaspoon and an Open Mind (www.whofic.com). Honestly, I don't remember much about it. I'm not sure, but I don't think they had a richtext editor at the time (2008) and I had to hand-code some or all of it. I vaguely remember having to do HTML for italics and paragraphs. I know I had to do that on LJ sometimes because the formatting from whatever word processor I was using at the time did some hinky shit sometimes on a copy/paste.

Next came LiveJournal (and DreamWidth, but I really only used that to back up my old LJ blog). It wasn't better than Teaspoon, just different. Teaspoon is niche, only fanfic and only for one fandom (well, one universe of fandoms, really, with all the spin-offs), where LJ was all kinds of stuff under one roof—personal blogs, communities with various intents and levels of participation, fanfic, fanart, gossip blogs, you name it. I liked the friendslist view thing; it was like proto-Tumblr. And you could talk to people on the threads; even personal blogs were like a forum.

I joined AO3 in 2011, after waiting like six months for more invites to open up, but I didn't post anything there until 2012. I'm really happy with it as a platform for posting fic. I like the editor and I like the tags, ratings, and sort features. I never even considered posting to ff.net because I'm a snobby fucker (and they can blow me with their whole “adult content ban” that still continues to be selectively enforced). Anyway, I preferred having my fic on AO3 before I even left LJ, since I didn't have to split my stories into parts because of character limits.

And then Tumblr took over and I kind of hate it, since you can't have conversations anymore, it's like leaving passive-aggressive post-its and there's no editing something once it gets reblogged, so typos and bad links and all that are always there. And even when the original is deleted, the reblog keeps going, which I really hate from a creator's standpoint (though the archivist/ curator part of me likes it because it doesn't get lost in the ether [the recent purge notwithstanding] like so much of the early days of the web did). Tumblr's really bad for posting anything but ficlets and links to fic on other sites.

satin_doll: What would your ideal fanfic publishing platform be like?

sunken_standard: Honestly, AO3 is just about as close to ideal as I can think of. I just wish you could directly upload images instead of having to do code jiggery-pokery to link to something hosted elsewhere. I've tried a million times and followed all the tutorials in an attempt to add the cover art to Longer Than the Road (gifted to me by @thecollapseinwonderland), but it just never works. It shows on the preview, but not on the live version and it's frustrating because I'm computer literate, goddamnit. Anyway. And I mean, in an ideal world there would be better ways to find quality fic to my taste, but there's no real way to add a rating system (like 5-stars) independent of kudos without discouraging authors (and I mean the potential for abuse and bullying is just too great).

Additional reader questions from @ohaine:

Stylistically, Longer than the road is quite different from the other fics at the top of the AO3 Sherlolly ratings; stream of consciousness at the beginning, and the nested internal thoughts. How much of that was a deliberate departure, and how much was you just channelling the story as it came out of you?

sunken_standard: At the time I was really influenced by a Sherlock/ John fic (I can't remember the title or author, it was 7 years ago, but I feel bad about forgetting). It was originally on LJ and their journal was a lightish blue color and the font was small (if anybody remembers this... there was something with an EKG and I think something with shooting up blood as a romantic gesture?). It was Sherlock POV and the author had a really unique way of presenting internal monologue. Anyway, at that time there was a lot of experimental writing going on on the slash side of things, it was great. To be perfectly honest, I hadn't read a lot of Sherlolly fic at that time because what did exist (as far as happy-ending/ happy-for-now stories vs like darkfic/ angst) was really, really not to my taste (the exception being Sustain). So it was only deliberate in that—even when I wasn't being experimental—I didn't want to write Harlequin books.

I wish a story like that would just come out of me. I mean, to a degree it did, but doing the thoughts and sub-thoughts was work. I mean, I've always been a brackets-and-footnotes kind of person because I like reading it, but the way I did the thoughts was more like writing HTML than a regular rambling narrative.

I think I read recently (maybe on a blog post?) that Riders on the storm was the original inspiration for Longer than the road. Was the scene in the storm your starting point with the story, or where did you begin?

sunken_standard: That was the first scene I wrote; at that time I had a really nebulous idea of the story. The imagery was really clear in my head, though the very earliest concept took place in the desert—the classic American image of the road going on forever and rusty sands and the heatwaves rising up off the asphalt. I'm not sure how it morphed into North Dakota, I might have seen a picture of lightning over the plains or something.

So after S2 aired, I just kind of sat and chewed it over for a month before any really strong ideas emerged for a story. I had to find the internal logic for the kind of plot I wanted to write—namely, them on the lam together. Making Sherlock have a breakdown seemed pretty natural at the time; in ACD canon (and many, many pastiches) he was always having them and going off to the country to recuperate. But he was supposed to be dead and he was all over the tabloids, so it's not like he could just move to some sleepy little village and hope no one recognized him.

I thought about sending him to Europe, using the places ACD Holmes went after Reichenbach (and I did start more than one with them in Florence, a few incarnations of which were Molly/ Irene wanklock PWPs, I actually think one of the Rusty Beds stories came from that, but I digress). The only problem with Europe is the language barrier; I thought it was too convenient to make Molly fluent in another language (she might have some conversational Spanish from a holiday or something, but that's it), so I had to make them go somewhere where English was common enough. I also didn't want them too far from the UK; I wanted Sherlock to be able to get on a plane and be back within half a day (I realize this isn't the reality of flying, but deus ex Mycroft, so). So Asia, Australia/ NZ, and even South Africa were out, leaving Canada, the US, or parts of the Caribbean. I didn't want them to by happy, so they didn't go to the Caribbean. Canada's great, but it's too nice and they also don't have deserts. America it was; it also really added some background tension because I think a lot of non-USians have a love-hate with us. Movies are okay, music too, and of course the tech and consumer innovations, but everything else is garbage and we're all just rude, ignorant, obese Yosemite Sams. For someone like Sherlock, I think the US is the last place he'd want to go (even though canon ACD Holmes was really into America). And I mean, write what you know, so that was that sorted.

Once I got them here I needed them to do something; I wanted to tell a very intimate story, and that would be boring if they were just living in a 2BR cape cod in Jersey. And I mean, what city would really suit Sherlock? Where could he have a life that wasn't London? Anyway, the inside of a car is just about as intimate as two people can get, and the greatest tradition in American literature and film is the road trip, and that was when I knew I had a solid foundation for a story. After that, it just kind of flowed as I planned the route.

Perfect, not perfect-perfect is a beautiful, brave piece that I think has a real air of authenticity to it. It was a very tough read, purely because of the journey the characters are on, and I wondered how difficult it was for you to write? Was it catharsis or an emotional black hole?

sunken_standard: You know, I'm not really sure if it was either catharsis or black hole. A lot of the particulars and even the emotional places in that story aren't mine, but an amalgam of some other friends' experiences with polyamory. My own experience with it was pretty shit and pretty unremarkable, but I learned a lot about the human heart and how some people can lie to themselves because they can't let go of their ideals and their identities (I'm also still a little bitter), but that's got nothing to do with the price of tea in China, so moving on.

Since a lot of those experiences weren't mine, it wasn't raw, so it wasn't very hard on me, personally. I think I wrote it in like three days? I don't think I wanted it to be a slog, so that's why it's in present tense and very sparse and matter-of-fact. Dispassionate, even. There are times when I'm writing really emotional stuff that I'm disconnected from it (which is a fuckin' mercy, because most of the time I'm right there going through it, over and over for days sometimes until I get the scene right and can move on to the next thing), and this was one of those times. I was writing this alongside the Girlfriend series, so there was some overlap there; I'd already done the emotional labor for everything up to Mary's death and I was thinking of different angles of approach for later installments of the series.

The most “me” part of it is near the beginning, writing my way around the bisexual experience from someone else's point of view. I don't have a lot in common with any of the characters; they're a higher social class, urban, products of a more liberal culture, yada yada, but there are some things that are just kind of universal and misunderstood about bisexuals, the stereotypes that we have to contend with and end up internalizing.

Oh, and the perpetual alienation is all me, too. Molly's feelings of being left behind are mine, how I felt every time friendships drifted apart or when female friends got married and then had kids. So a lot of the fatalism and insecurity are me projecting how I would feel or react. I kind of like depressed Molly, more than the perpetual ray of sunshine/ cinnamon roll at least.

*********

Many thanks to sunken_standard for taking the time to answer these questions!

And many thanks and much love to OhAine for all her hard work putting this project together! It’s been fun and enlightening!

Next week, Friday 29th March, it’s the turn of @ellis-hendricks and @geekmama

#content creator interviews #sherlolly #Sherlock #ashockinglackofsatin #sunken_standard

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youknowmymethods · 6 years ago

Text

Content Creator Interview #3

In the third part of this series it’s @ohaine ‘s turn (*waves*) to pick @ashockinglackofsatin ‘s (satin_doll’s) brain about inspiration for baroque and larger than life OCs, what poetry has to do with fanfiction, and how a chance encounter with a masked swordsman kicked her down the path to fandom and fanfic writing.

(My apologies if the formatting looks a bit weird to you. This looks fine on my desktop, but a bit crazy in the mobile app. Not sure what’s going on or how to fix it, so...)

“He drapes the black cloth carefully. He doesn't want to disturb more than necessary. As he works, he murmurs to them, softly, ever so softly. Periodically, he pauses and stares into the distance, as if he's watching for a visitor. No one will come now. Not out here. Not for him.”

-Telling the Bees

If you read enough, if you pay enough attention, every now and then you’re rewarded with a fanfic author who not only truly understands the character they’re writing, but who also truly understands writing itself. They’re a gift. Not only to their readers but to other writers who take inspiration from them, who learn from them, who aspire to be as good as them.

On a sunny Saturday morning in April 2016 for the very first time I opened satin_doll’s page on AO3 and read her first Sherlolly story, “Telling the Bees.” I cried fat, ugly tears for Sherlock, for Molly, (inconvenient, not to mention embarrassing as I was in a public place) but I smiled because I’d found one. A gift. It was the beginning of a love affair with her work, the beginning of a masterclass in writing and understanding, but maybe even more importantly it was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. And it began with the same first words I’ve used to introduce her here.

It’s a joyous thing to be given the opportunity to talk to her about her writing. Whether it’s a revelatory character study, like “Down and Shaking When I Think I Lose,” the heart-wrenching romance of “Doubt,” even the so-perfect-it-could-be-canon world of the “Dark Company” series, satin_doll pulls you down a rabbit hole, into Sherlock’s world in a way that makes you understand him better, and teaches you something about yourself in the process.

Funny, clever, insightful, she’s my number one writing crush, I love her to bits.

Over Christmas 2018 satin_doll (@ashockinglackofsatin here on tumblr) was kind enough to answer my fangirling questions about her writing and characters. I hope you all enjoy reading what she had to say as much as I did.

OhAine: So, starting at your beginning, how did the spark ignite?

satin_doll: I started with fiction before I could actually read or write. When I was four years old, there was a television show on about Robin Hood. My mom would park me in front of the television every day when this show was on (probably to get some relief/keep me out of her face for a little while so she could get something done) and I was absolutely in love with Robin Hood. I made up stories and made my mother write them down for me. This is how I learned to read and write: she started teaching me my letters when I asked her what the little black marks were on the paper. Once I learned, I read everything I could get my hands on. I read literally everything. I was absolutely fascinated with words. I belonged to a children's book club, went to the library, read my parents books (both my mom and stepdad were voracious readers, so there were books everywhere.) I especially loved books about fantastic things - magic, sorcery, dragons, etc. I loved mythology, superheroes, science fiction and fantasy. I collected comic books for years. Not much changed as I got older. Speculative fiction is still what I'm drawn to.

Despite my obsession with books and stories, I never considered myself a "writer" until after college. In school, I had the usual literature and writing classes until I met Mr. P, my creative writing professor. He was a well-known poet (think Pulitzer Prize) and our creative writing was almost exclusively poetry. I fell in love with both him and poetry and continued to take classes with him for years. One of my proudest achievements was breaking into a particularly choosy literary magazine and being published in it before he was. He never let me forget that. He also was fond of saying "Novelists are failed poets", which I took to heart for a long while once I understood what he was saying. He wasn't criticizing novelists, just making a point about how to write poetry. That's about the extent of my training as a writer; the rest is just me and my periodic forays into hubris.

OhAine: Is voracious reading how you discovered fanfiction?

satin_doll: No, it was on the old Compuserve bulletin boards. And loved it. But it didn't really occur to me to write it back then.

In 1998, I belonged to an online discussion group about Zorro. I had a video tape of all the old Disney episodes and I adored Guy Williams. One of the ladies in the group - I still don't remember why she chose me - asked me to write her a story about Zorro, so I did. I think Zorro ended up in a bathtub with a lady, taking his mask off and introducing himself by his real name. I don't know what happened to that file, I wish I still had it. As I recall, it was a nice story and I was very pleased with it. At any rate, that was my first fanfic as an adult that I shared with someone else, and after that I couldn't quit doing it.

OhAine: It’s that sharing that makes fanfiction unique, isn’t it? Because the reader isn’t some abstract concept, far removed from you, we’re all part of the same fandom so you get an instant connection, almost real-time feedback.

satin_doll: Exactly. And that feedback is critical for a writer, no matter how much some of us protest that we "write for ourselves." We don't live in a vacuum and psychologically speaking, for writers, sharing our work is an important form of setting boundaries, which is expressing who and what we are. This is especially true for fanfic writers, I think. When we post work, we're not doing it so that we can go back and look at it ourselves. We're communicating and we're communicating something important. We join a fandom because we like it, and to communicate that enjoyment with other like-minded individuals. We want to share what we love and what we know. When we write stories about the characters or using a particular setting or universe, we're expressing, communicating - hopefully - something important about ourselves, both individually and as a group.

When I write fanfic, I write it to communicate. I don't expect lots of kudos or comments; in fact, I'm usually surprised that anyone reads it at all, let alone takes the time to leave a remark or anything of that sort. But it's out there, and hopefully someone will read it and it will touch something inside them, have a little meaning for them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not writing to change anyone's life. It's enough to trigger some feeling, some emotional response, make them think or even just go "hmmm." I recently received a comment from someone who said they "had never thought of it that way." That was extremely satisfying to me, it meant that I had reached someone, made them think or consider something a different way and that's exactly why I write.

OhAine: Is that how you measure the success of a piece? Or do you have something else you measure it by?

satin_doll: Success to me is simply getting it done! Feedback is lovely, it's wonderful, and I adore it, but if I had to go by that I'd never write another word. In terms of feedback, the stories I would have thought would be well received generally aren't and the ones I think no one will like do fairly well, all things considered. Writing is hard, and I'm a very slow writer. I'm also probably more serious about it than most in the fan fiction realms. Not that I think my stories warrant "serious" consideration, but that the writing of them is a serious act for me. If I'm able to sit down and finish a piece, that's a success as far as I'm concerned. That they get any notice at all is icing on the cake.

OhAine: So I wanted to drill down a bit into some of your stories. Choosing which ones to ask you about was difficult because I have so many questions about your process, but I’ve settled in the end on two that I think are representative of the things you do best; OCs and character examination. Words (part of the Dark Company series) stands out for me as one of your most memorable stories not only because it has an outstanding OC (as all of the Dark series stories do) in the form of Mr P., but because of the very Sherlock way that Sherlock approaches the problem of his feelings for Molly Hooper. Can you tell me a bit about the inspiration for that story?

satin_doll: Sherlock and "feelings" is a notorious problem for writers, I think. Moftiss didn't do us any favors with their approach to the subject. Most tend to depict Sherlock as being clueless about feelings in general, which I understand. But in my universes, he isn't clueless so much as he is averse. Feelings can cause problems, both professionally and personally, so he buries them. But (in my version) he does this consciously. It isn't because he's unaware, it's a choice. Along with that choice come consequences. When he decides that he WANTS to deal with the feelings, he doesn't quite know how because he's never practiced expressing them or communicating on that level. It's like having a muscle that you've barely used; it's weak and it doesn't function properly yet. So, when he decides that he wants to start dealing with the emotional side of his relationship with Molly, what would he do?

My idea was that he would go to an expert in emotional expression for help, at least in the initial approach. Who better to come up with the right words than a poet? In the Dark Universe, Sherlock knows experts in everything. They are his friends, people he has interacted with, who know him and whom he knows and trusts completely. That was the beginning idea. Sherlock goes to one of his friends for help in finding the exact right words to open up the way to moving forward with Molly. Mr. P gives him a little poem that sort of wraps up the problem with the relationship as it is, and gives them both a push in the right direction. Sherlock does this because he is AWARE that he has a weak emotional muscle, not because he doesn't have one. It was like his first excursion to the emotional gym. He had to have help to get started.

OhAine: And the poem at the end – “How is it that we say so much in our first glance of greeting, Yet our words sit on our tongues like tiny, frozen birds?” – it absolutely kills me.

satin_doll: You can blame my own Mr. P for that. I spent years writing mostly poetry, and though I don't get that "poetic" in most of my fics, I was taught to cut and condense (also a result of writing movie reviews and doing interviews for work), to focus on the exact word or image that would get the point across or get the right response (thank you Semantics 101.) I also love haiku, which I consider the ultimate form of poetry, and distilling the essence of what you want to say into a single image is really good practice for writing of any kind. There is a place for long, flowery descriptives in writing fiction, I suppose, but in the end you have to remember that you're telling a story and you don't want the words to get in the way of that. Simple is always best, in poetry as well as fiction.

OhAine: I thought it was interesting that in this story he reached out to her in such a romantic way, yet you managed to still have it happen in a way that’s very much true to their characters. How do you walk that line between showing something that we only ever get the barest of hints of on screen, expanding the characters into places and emotions that we’re not familiar with, yet still keep them true to themselves?

satin_doll: Ah, this is a touchy one. We all have our own versions of Sherlock, of what we think is "in character" for him. Mine is such a mishmash of nearly every incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, going all the way back to the ACD beginnings. There are inconsistencies in those first stories as far as Sherlock's character is concerned, but there are strong consistencies also. What I object to is the reliance on physical habits or traits in place of actual character. Using certain physical attributes portrayed in the series for example (the popping of P in certain words, certain phrases borrowed from the show used over and over, etc.) does nothing to show character. I don't actually rely on the BBC series for my version of Sherlock; mine is a combination of all the Sherlock's I've known over many years. I always start from that. Likewise, you can't confuse the actor with the character, and I see that so very often in fics.

Molly, on the other hand, is much more difficult because we only have what we see in the BBC series and there's very little of that. So I sort of have to ask some questions that involve my version of Sherlock: What would he be drawn to? What character traits would he find appealing, be able to trust, and why? What would it be about Molly Hooper that Sherlock would want/love? We get little hints in the BBC show, and oddly enough, she does change and grow throughout. I never saw Molly as mousey. I mean, look at what she's doing in the very first minutes we meet her! Look at what her job is! I adored her from those first few brief minutes and I knew that of all the women in Sherlock's life, she would be the one that would appeal to him. So that's the way I write her (mostly; there are a few times I've been a little untrue to Molly, but not many.)

OhAine: It’s obvious that although they’re superficially very different you see them as very much the same beneath the surface.

satin_doll: Sherlock has always known that he is not like other people; he's not "normal". Molly, on the other hand, was taught that "normal" was something she should aspire to, to be like other people. So she fights her nature - which, to me, would have to be a little dark, otherwise she wouldn't be drawn to Sherlock, she wouldn't have pursued the career she did. In the Dark series, Sherlock is trying to teach her that she doesn't have to deny those inner aspects of herself that are decidedly NOT normal, in order to be happy. No matter how much she tries, "normal" doesn't work out for her. Little by little, they are both learning to accept things they've denied in themselves and they're finding it in their "dark" natures, in the dark around them, which can contain so much knowledge and wisdom if we're willing to explore it - and relief from trying to be something other than who you really are.

OhAine: And you’ve chosen to do that with OCs that are worthy of canon; Doyle couldn’t have done better in creating a world for modern day Sherlock. They have a vibrancy that’s worthy of a main character, yet you manage to do that without distracting from Sherlock and Molly’s story. How do you find these characters’ and their voices?

satin_doll: I know a lot of weird people. :D

Seriously, I don't think we have to make up original characters whole cloth. We all know people in our real lives who would make great fictional characters. I take a person I've known (for example: Sean, Sherlock's twin in Mango. I did know a person whose father shot her mother in front of her. I borrowed the incident, added a few traits from other people I know and voila, instant character) and insert them into the story. It's part of what's called "writing about what you know." The more from real life you can insert into your stories, the more realistic and satisfying they are. This goes for plot and description as well as characters. As for making them not take over the story completely, you do that by giving them an emotional tie to the main character but not letting that original character take over the main plot. The inner/outer struggle and emotional growth have to be about your protagonist, your main characters.

OhAine: That neatly brings me to Down and Shaking When I Think I Lose which is a masterpiece, and something that’s rare these days: an old school character study. You’ve written Season One Sherlock in a way that I haven’t seen done very often and not in a number of years. It’s outstanding because your Sherlock is atypical in a way that Mofftiss sadly abandoned after S2. There’s a line in your story that says, ‘Sometimes he wanted to be worn to nothing,’ that hones in on the cost of being Sherlock. Can you talk a bit about how this story came to be, and what about the canon character formed this version of him in your mind?

satin_doll: You have to understand, I love Sherlock Holmes deeply and have for a very, very long time. To me, he's not just a quirky, interesting character. He's my hero. And I have a thing about heroes.

I see a lot written about Sherlock that portrays him as broken in some way, or as deficient. There's always this underlying assumption that there's something "wrong" with him. Maybe there is, according to the scale by which normal people are judged. But there's another aspect to him that I've never really seen written about: what does he have to give up in order to do what he does? See I don't think he's unaware of how he is. I think he chooses to be that way. Part of that choice is to give up - to literally sacrifice - all those things that other people have as a matter of course: homes, families, relationships, emotional connections. This is part of the Heroic Saga. All heroes must sacrifice in order to be what/who they are. All of them, no exceptions. If they have the capacity to be the Hero, if they choose to go that way, they must sacrifice what the rest of us take for granted. There's a line from a book that I have constantly playing in the back of my head: "Who will do the hard things? Those who can." Sherlock is one of "those who can"; he CAN do the hard things. But always, implied in that, is sacrifice. If you choose to do the hard things, because you can, you must give up everything else.

There is an episode of Zorro where Diego de la Vega makes the decision to give up being Zorro. He decides he is tired of not having what everyone else has. He wants a home and a family and a relationship with a woman he's fallen in love with. He tells his father what his plans are, and his father, bless him, even though he's an old man, decides that he must take up the mask and become Zorro - because someone has to. Someone HAS to do the hard things. When Diego realizes what his father is doing, and what his father is giving up, and that his father will most likely die as Zorro, they have a long discussion about what being a hero and doing the hard things actually means, how important it is that someone fill that role. Diego makes the decision to continue wearing the mask, to sacrifice everything he thinks he wants, in order to do something he realizes is more important - because he CAN. He will do the hard things, because he can. In my mind (and heart), this is Sherlock. He does what no one else does, what no one else CAN do, because he can. The sad part of all this is that usually, no one else realizes how hard those things are or what sacrifices have to be made in order to do them. The hero gets criticized for not being like other people, they get ostracized, shunned, ridiculed, misunderstood. But they still keep doing it. No matter how frustrating, lonely, terrifying the role is, they keep doing it because they know they can. No matter what they have to give up, they do it.

I wanted to show that Sherlock has suffered all his life simply because of how he is and what he can do. And he chooses to embrace it, to stay true to himself in spite of everything, because he knows what he can do. It wears on him. It's lonely. It's exhausting. Frustrating. But he knows what he can do, and he does it, despite it all. Because someone has to.

OhAine: It’s funny, but I often think Sherlock’s sacrifice is less of a willing one than he’d have us believe. He says, ‘not my area,’ ‘while fulfilling for others,’… less ‘my mind is a temple’ than ‘I don’t think I can have both, despite the fact that I want both.’

satin_doll: Sherlock as hero is my own interpretation, based more on a combination of all the Sherlock's I've been exposed to over many years than on the BBC Sherlock alone. I don't really see all that many stories depicting him as a hero, which I totally understand given that so many discovered him from that series. I don't think Sherlock ever sees himself as a hero or tries to present himself as one to anyone else, but I think he's aware of the sacrifices he's had to make in order to do what he does, even in the BBC version. Otherwise I don't think he'd let anyone into his life at all, let alone work closely with people or consider anyone a "friend" - and yet that's exactly what he does, because he needs some sort of human connection even when he keeps them at a distance. There are a lot of interpretations out there of Sherlock and many many legitimate reasons people see for the way he behaves and what he does. Far be it from me to say that any of them are wrong. But for me, I don't think any hero's sacrifice is all that willing, no matter how aware he/she might be of it. In all of them, when that awareness is depicted, it takes the form of wistfulness when they realize what they've had to give up, to downright misery and attempts not to give up what they see other people having - which always fail. Sherlock is no exception in my universe.

This is where my frustration with Mofftiss comes in. Despite showing Sherlock as the supposed hero, they belittle everything else about him. They never address the facts that Sherlock literally gave up his life to save his friends, that what he does is absolutely extraordinary, in favor of depicting him as simply a social misfit with slightly nefarious motives, who needs to be changed into something resembling their idea of what "human" is. As a result, they have a schizophrenic John Watson, who never quite appreciates Sherlock or what he does despite more than ample evidence, and other characters that rather quickly become caricatures rather than actual characters.

OhAine: I agree with you that Mofftiss belittle him, mostly through the disrespect of other characters, which really doesn’t happen in the ACD stories, certainly not by those closest to him…Watson, Mycroft... They sort of excused that away by saying ‘this turned out to be an origin story’ when we know that they were trying to convey isolation, but because they were unsuccessful it kinda sorta turned into bullying.

satin_doll: I think it's Benedict's performance more than the writing that makes BBC's version so appealing. He does capture, as much as possible given what he has to work with, Sherlock's dilemma - how to keep those connections with people in his life without letting them get too close. By episode two in series one, I was already starting to really resent the way John careened back and forth between admiration and caring and literally sneering at Sherlock for the way he was. Within minutes in episode two, series one, we have John treating Sherlock like a naughty child, then asking him for money, substituting the word "colleague" for the word friend and then jumping in to join Sherlock on an adventure. It just got worse from there. The BBC version became less about Sherlock and more and more about John's mental struggles, all the while trying to make Sherlock seem to be the one who was unstable and twisted. I know this is an unpopular viewpoint nowadays, so I don't generally say much about it. But it's been a major sticking point with me throughout all four series.

Having said all that about Mofftiss, I still watch all the episodes regularly because a) it's Sherlock Holmes, and b) I adore Cumberbatch's performance. :D

OhAine: Controversial take: I never really believed that Sherlock sacrificed himself for his friends. I think that was a consideration, one that could have been dealt with by Mycroft if he was motivated to, but I think the main reason he left London for two years was for the sheer adventure of it all… (Not true, I don’t think, of his sacrifice for Mary though…)

satin_doll: I can easily see this viewpoint. It could even be said that he left just because the people around him were simply getting too close and he needed a way to sever or lessen those ties before they got out of hand. Personally I don't think it was that simple. In the ACD version, Sherlock is gone for three years, and he's not dismantling anything - he just stays away for that long and travels around the world until he hears that the last remaining Moriarty Minion who wants to kill him is back in London. There's a bit of remorse for leaving John to grieve, but it's quickly resolved. In the Mofftiss version, it feels like a contrived set up; they use the excuse that he's doing it all to protect his friends, but really, I've never bought that between Mycroft and Sherlock they couldn't have come up with a better, easier way to deal with the situation. If they could calculate seventeen outcomes of the meeting on the roof? I mean really?

OhAine: I’d say moving swiftly along, but neither of us do things swiftly LOL. Anyway. *Moving* along, Bring me my Queen is a stunning piece of storytelling that focuses on Molly this time, and for me it brings together your storytelling strengths in one piece. You’ve obviously drawn on real life experiences with this one, and I wonder how important that is for you? Is it a device, catharsis, processing of the emotions…?

satin_doll: It's probably all of those things. I use the stories and the characters to act out stories from my life, because it's what I know. It helps me to vent and process emotional aspects, but it also gives the characters something real to deal with; it makes them more like real people. At least in my head. It helps express beliefs, process both pain and joy, let people know what I've learned, hopefully touch them in some real way. Stories are to help us deal with real life situations, to communicate and to learn from, as well as give enjoyment and entertain us. Years ago, during a spiritual study, I read something that really struck a chord with me (I even ended up writing an article about it, which I'm sure still exists online somewhere but hell if I can find it now!): Messages from the Universe most often come to us via our favorite form of entertainment. What better way to get through to us or catch our attention than in the form of something we really enjoy? So I look at fanfic, both writing and reading, as a way to be in touch with the Universal Intelligence, a way to learn what life is trying to show me, and a way for the Universe to use me to reach others.

And after all that, writing stories is the best way to vent that I've ever found. :D

OhAine: I think you’re right. I think the message finds us in a way that we’ll be willing to receive.

satin_doll: Back in the 1990s, I saw a movie in the theater and near the beginning was a line from one of the characters that hit me so hard, on so many levels, that I didn't even remember anything about the rest of the film. I had to see it again in order to see how it all turned out. That one line quite literally changed my life. Since then there have been many other occasions where the things I enjoy the most have contained deep words, phrases, concepts that have had incredible impact and resulted in life changes. I know most people believe that change in our lives more often comes from pain and tragedy, but honestly, I don't think that's true. If we pay attention, we more often learn life lessons from joy and pleasure and entertainment - and creativity. It's only when we don't pay attention that the universe has to hit us upside the head with a bat and we have to learn from pain.

OhAine: Change, and messages from the universe, is something that’s a theme in Mango which is also a bit of a feminist story because (and correct me if I’m off base) it’s about empowerment and independence: Molly discovering things about herself, by herself, which I thought when reading was almost a parallel for women in writing (particularly fanfiction). How important has writing been for you in developing your understanding of yourself and your own identity as a woman?

satin_doll: I'm not sure I have an answer for this one. Writing has always simply been a part of my life. I write because I can't not write. I think more of my understanding of myself and being a woman came from music, which is a notoriously misogynistic art. I actually had a male musician tell me to my face that I couldn't know that much about music because I'm female. Those were his exact words. I've played in bands with both women and men and the women have always been easiest to work with. I think part of this has to do with men viewing sex as "their area". Sex, to men, is always about them. Women in music, especially rock music, are a lot like women in fanfic, where our own sexuality is seemingly always under attack. It's as if we don't exist unless we're defined by males. I find this absolutely absurd and hateful. Mango, the song itself, was written expressly to celebrate female sexuality. Molly dancing around the room to that song when she sees Sherlock again after a year away, is a sort of celebration of her own self-discovery. The dance is her way of honoring herself and her sex. That Sherlock discovers her that way was very fitting, because she leads him into a discovery of his own sexuality as well. I wish more men would wake up to the fact that we can do this.

OhAine: It’s an incredible story, but then so many of yours are, so I wonder is there one of your stories that you're very proud of, or one that you're particularly happy with how the finished piece turned out?

satin_doll: Oddly enough, I don't have a lot of pride connected with my stories once they're finished. I write them and put them out there and then I'm pretty much done with them. There are some I like a little more than others, I guess - Dark I like because it broke something loose in me that apparently I'd been ignoring. I think, if I have any pride about them, it's just that I write them at all. I'm proud of myself for actually sitting down and doing them. If there is one that I would have to say I'm "proud" of, it would be An Avenue Once Bent in Shadow - one that isn't even finished and that is totally unlike any others I've written. I like it because of its intent, which is to highlight and illustrate differences and how those differences are both perceived and dealt with in the world. It sort of takes both Molly and Sherlock to the extreme, and I like that also. It's a challenge.

OhAine: I think you should be overflowing with pride in your work. You’re gifted. Your stories are beautiful.

satin_doll: Thank you. I suppose a lot of this comes from my childhood and maybe a little bit of misunderstanding on my part about the word "pride". I think I'm more attached and proud of just having the guts to dive into the creative process at all rather than the results of it. But that's just me.

OhAine: Well then getting back to your creative process, tell me about finding a particular character’s voice. Are there things that you do to get you into their heads?

satin_doll: When I was about ten, I wanted to be an actor. This lasted for about three years. I went around trying on characters from movies and television, practicing their expressions and movements and voices. These days I tend to act out the characters in my own stories. If I can feel them physically, feel them in my body and face, I feel like I can write them. Feeling Sherlock turn his head a certain way or have an expression on his face, feeling the way Molly would look up at him or move around the lab - I tend to rely on that to get them in character, or at least how I feel they're in character. I also have to hear their voices in my head. I read all the dialogue out loud and if it doesn't fit - it don't sit.

OhAine: I read it out loud too, something I learned in Uni. It truly helps, doesn’t it?

satin_doll: I guess there are writers who don't do this, but I don't know how they can get dialogue to work any other way. It's been said about Stephen King's work, by people who have adapted his books into film, that one of the reasons it's so hard to translate his books successfully to scripts is that he doesn't write dialogue the way people normally speak. Supposedly when you read successful dialogue, our brain translates it differently from the way we would hear it if it was spoken aloud. I've never tested this and part of me doesn't believe it. But then, I'm not an expert about any of it. I just know that being able to hear the words out loud makes a difference for me as far as character is concerned.

OhAine: What’s the beginning point of a story for you? Are you a methodical planner, or is it purely instinct?

satin_doll: It's purely instinct. I have tried and tried to do it the "professional", by-the-book way, and it's always a disaster. The beginning is usually a mood and it can be inspired by just about anything. Most of the time a story just comes out full blown, beginning to end; it's just there and I write it. I had one story pop into my head while I was doing dishes. I stopped, wiped off my hands, and sat down and wrote the story all at once. Then I went back to doing dishes. I don't have any idea where it came from or what inspired it, it just happened. Most of them are like that. Maybe if I was a planner and methodical about it I'd write better stories! :D But this seems to be the only way I can do it and actually get anything written.

OhAine: We can’t talk about fanfiction right now without talking about what’s happening on tumblr / the purge. You’ve been writing online for a good number of years and I’m sure you have a take on it…

satin_doll: Sadly, I've seen this happen over and over since 1993. A space becomes a haven for expression and then suddenly comes under attack for one reason or another by one group or another. Luckily, there will always be somewhere new to go. It's painful and sometimes a long and trying process, but in the words of Mr. Universe: "You can't stop the signal." Someplace new will open up and, for a while at least, free expression will be allowed again. William Gibson, among others, wrote about this very thing, long before the internet was established in our lives. There are always going to be those who try to squash creativity. Unfortunately, being creative doesn't fit into neat little non-offensive boxes the way some want it to. But it will survive. It always has. It's the nature of the beast.

OhAine: It can’t help but survive given the volume of fan created content that’s out there now, there’s obviously a huge appetite to create it as well as consume. And having that said, do you think fanfiction has become mainstream?

satin_doll: Depends on your definition of mainstream. Everything eventually trickles down into the mainstream. Unfortunately this isn't always a good thing. What passes for fanfiction these days is far different from what it used to be. I won't go into "Back in the Good Ol' Days". But by definition, the mainstream waters everything down, dilutes it. It loses some of its substance. Fan fiction has gotten a lot of attention lately, partly because so much of it has dealt with issues that are in the forefront of our lives, namely sex and identity. The fact that the majority of fanfic writers are women only adds to that. The danger is that the issues could also become watered down, so to speak - diluted - because of becoming "mainstream". Hopefully fanfic will survive the process.

OhAine: Which is why it’s so important for spaces like AO3 to exist.

satin_doll: I think it's vital to life on this planet. Censorship is one of the great evils of life. AO3 and the OTW are champions of freedom, of every human being's right to expression. I don't care how offensive that expression is, we have to protect the right to it. "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." There's a reason those words were written and it's not just about fair play.

OhAine: "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Should be AO3’s banner, tbh…

satin_doll: The older I get, the more important this has become. Censorship is subtle and insidious and infects societies on so many levels. It's not just some huge noisy machine created by the government; it can be found in very small social groups and cliques as well and results in making people invisible, which is one of the worst punishments humans have ever invented. We see the consequences of this every day in every walk of life. There's a lot to be said about all the different types of censorship that impact our lives. And I agree, that line would make a great banner for AO3. :)

OhAine: I think that’s as good a place as any to wrap thing up! Kat, it’s been an absolute joy, thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions!

Next Friday, 8th of March, @writingwife-83 talks to @thisisartbylexie

#content creator interviews #Sherlock #sherlolly #sherlock and sherlolly content creator interviews #ashockinglackofsatin #ohaine

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