The Suds Bucket

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We are mere days away from the end of Guiding Light, the longest running soap opera in history. Seventy-two years of soap legacy will be laid to rest this Friday and, for the first time, I am not looking forward to the weekend, knowing that come Monday morning at 10am ET, there will be a game show in the place of my beloved sudser.  How odd will it be to watch the Light dim and know that it will never be turned on again? I will never see Emma Spencer Spaulding grow into the heroine that she is destined to be or what will become of Dinah Marler in old age, or even what a supercouple Bill Lewis and Lizzie Spaulding could have been in soap history.

All that remains is this feeling of loss, as if the stories are incomplete. The cancellation in April stunted the storyline potentials for the show, such as the romance of Olivia Spencer and Natalia Rivera and an epic reunion fitting of supercouple Josh Lewis and Reva Shayne. What remained was the hurried knotting of loose ends and character exits that left me feeling a little flat, rather than moved.

I have read many articles stating that the death knell for the show was the now infamous change in their production model, which focused on outdoor shooting, scaled down sets and handheld cameras. I tend to disagree. Instead of looking at the rich filmmaking that the soap produced this year, many tend to fall back on weak excuses for the show’s demise that may have been correct had the show been cancelled last year. However, 2009 brought with it a greater understanding by the cast and crew of the potential the new production model could have. Let me remind you of the expert filmmaking during the week of April 13, 2009.

The graveyard confession by Olivia to Natalia, the framing of the anguish experienced by the two women during Natalia’s wedding vows to Frank Cooper and the exquisite gazebo love confession by Natalia under a blanket of snow perfectly showcased the upswing for this production model. You cannot discount how intimate and powerful these scenes were, mainly due to the camera work and location shooting that complimented and accentuated the powerhouse performances put in by Crystal Chappell and Jessica Leccia.

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An Insight into the World of Fan Fiction: Part 5

Here it is folks, the last part of my interview with Otalia fan fiction author, DiNovia. Here she starts delving into her most popular story, Hide Beside Me.

Now, I know you have your secrets that you cannot reveal, but inquiring minds want to know. How many chapters do you have planned right now? Is it still 44? Will we get another chance to have the girls do the deed?

Ah, ha! Hide Beside Me questions. Currently, the chapter count is now at 45. It could change again. With an epilogue, afterwards. The epilogues will not be one of those gigantic, seventy-thousand word epilogues. It will be a true epilogue. I believe, probably, no more than five to seven thousand words, if that long. Of course, the chapter count could change, just depending on what I need to add or what I find I need to add as I get further along in the story. Currently, in addition to Chapter 26, which was Olivia and Natalia’s first time together, there will be an additional four or five other sex scenes, I believe. I can’t believe the exact number and I could look it up in my outline, but there will be other opportunities for, yes, the girls to “do the deed,” as you say.

So, when are Natalia and Olivia going to catch a break and get some outside help in dealing with Phillip?

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An Insight into the World of Fan Fiction: Part 4

Here you go Otalians, part four of my interview with DiNovia. I start asking her details about "Hide Beside Me"!


If I may ask, where did the original idea for “Hide Beside Me” come from? Did Fewthistle have anything to do with the creation of this amazing story?

Actually, the idea, when I first started writing for Otalia, I did that challenge, where it was put your iPod on shuffle and write a story to the first ten songs, and one of the songs that came up was a dance mix. No words, very throbby, rave-type music called Hyperborea, which actually is another word for Winter, by DJ Donna Olivia. I was listening to it and I was like, “Ah, how the hell am I going to write a story to this?!” There’s no words. There’s not even a real, clear intent for the song, other than to make you dance and I was like, “Well, god, what am I going to do with this?” So I listened to it a couple of times and as I listened to it, I was paying attention more to the beat of the music than any of the actual notes or anything like that. I was paying attention to how it sounded rushed. It made me want, and when I hear it in the car, it always makes me wants to drive faster. So, I was like, “Ok, something about faster, faster,” and then it just popped into my head.


This ficlet that I wrote for that particular piece, it’s known as “Number Seven,” from that post, that I ended up writing almost entirely in first person, and almost, I mean, it was probably the fastest one I wrote, even though it was not the shortest. This little blurb about how they’d gone on the run and Natalia had cut her hair, Olivia had confessed her love and they were trying to protect Emma from Phillip. It was all encapsulated in about five or six paragraphs and somebody wrote back to me and said, “You should really expand this one. This one has great potential,” and I said, “Oh, haha, thanks a lot.” Then somebody else came and said, “No, no, I agree,” and the more they talked about it and commented there, the more interested I became in the concept.

Then, when I came up with the whole idea, because I couldn’t figure out how I was going to do it in first person the whole way through, because I knew it was going to have to be a long one, I came up with the idea of doing first person perspective for Natalia, for Olivia, and for Emma, and then doing third person past omniscient for any other exposition that I needed. It became a very urgent feeling item, and it became, actually, quite exciting to write at that point because I became enamored of the fact that I could get into the heads of these three, well these two women and this one child, much better doing it that way, than trying to do it from one person’s perspective all the way through. Suddenly that became a challenge to me, and I’m nothing if not up for a challenge, so I ended up writing it that way.

Fewthistle did not actually have anything to do with the creation of this story. At the time, she hadn’t even started watching Otalia clips, I believe, when I first started writing it. It was more along the lines of a couple people commenting to me. I know one of them was one of my betas, Megan. I can’t remember who the other one was. I have a feeling it was probably Shiva. [Laughter] But I’m somehow not giving her the credit that she is due for the creation of this story. I’ll have to go back and look at the comments to find out who exactly it was. So, yeah, that’s where “Hide Beside Me” came from, and the title came from a Goo Goo Dolls’ song called “Name.” That song always had the feel of, you know, protection, like somebody famous was being protected by someone who wasn’t famous in that song and I thought it fit well with the feel that I wanted to do here. Which was basically, take the canon and change it drastically, from 2/16/09, which is the episode it shears off from.

Ok, Fewthistle, someone I have heard so much about. Tell us a little bit about your partnership.

Ah, what can I say about Few? Few and I have been running in the same fan fiction circles for years now. Somewhere between eight and ten. We originally came to know each other in the Janeway/Seven of Nine fandom, of Star Trek Voyager, is my guess, and we’ve been rotating, or going through our fandoms, pretty much on the same alignment ever since. I wrote one story for Law and Order: Trial by Jury, she wrote several. I did not write any for Law and Order (mothership), and she wrote several. I wrote a lot for Law and Order: SVU, and so has she, but with a different pairing. I was Olivia/Casey, and she was Olivia/Alex. I did not write anything for Devil Wears Prada, which is one of her favorite genres. We, and I mean we, by myself and one of our mutual friends, Flyingpeanuts, got her into Otalia by basically just nagging her, over and over again until she threatened to kill us. She watched the clips and then threatened to kill us again because she didn’t have time for another fandom. Then she said she’d never write for Otalia, and now she’s writing for Otalia. So. [Laughter] But I still get the death threats often.

Few also found out, oh, three years ago, that she lived within an hour and a half of me, and we decided to meet and have lunch, and since then, we’ve been dear, dear friends. Honestly, I don’t know what I would do without her. We go to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, twice a year to hang out at old Salem, at the bakery and have dinner. We’re just really good friends, and her friendship means a great deal to me. I will always be grateful for the fandoms that brought us together and the fact that, you know, that I’ve been able to meet her and make our friendship something that I will cherish for many years to come.

Our partnership? She and I talk on the phone regularly. We both feel the same way about the current canon storyline on Guiding Light, and so we came up with the idea of the community, Burning City, that cuts canon off as 6/22/09, which we decided would be the way that we would want to handle it. We created that site, and the back-up archive site. We have a few other people involved there too. Flyingpeanuts is one of the moderators and another mutual friend of ours does the archiving. We’re very passionate about Burning City because we believe that it has the potential to have some really good writing in it. It’s a new community. It’s less than two weeks old. Actually, I think it’s two weeks old now, and we’re excited to see it grow, and to see the people who will come and share their works with us. So, yeah, Fewthistle and I, we talk about storylines a lot, we write stories in our heads, we jokingly talk about the Olivia that lives in my head and the Olivia that lives in her head, and those two Olivias are very different people, [Laughter] and that sort of thing, and so, we have a great friendship. I think that, you know, our writing reflects some of that passion that we both have for this storyline too, and that makes us even better friends.

How far ahead have you got it planned out in detail? What happens if something similar you have had planned for a future chapter or other story randomly occurs on the show or in another writer’s fic?

Interesting questions. First of all, I have the whole thing planned out, all the way through the epilogue. My outline goes chapter-by-chapter, tells me who’s speaking, where they are in the world, because, as you know, Olivia and Natalia are on the run, and so they’re in different cities at any given time. It tells me whether or not it’s a Springfield chapter or one of the girls, obviously, and sometimes the line from the song that I used for the cut-text in livejournal that will be there because I’ve already picked it out. Then, underneath that, there’ll be, maybe, five or ten lines of notes. Sometimes they’re just two to three word sentences just to remind me what I have planned, but I do have it all the way planned out to the very end, including the epilogue.

For instance, I can give you the notes that I had for Chapter 23, which was Emma’s chapter as they were driving to Oklahoma. Sometimes the things that I write down as notes change a little bit, or are removed or overlooked or, not overlooked, but I decide not to do them for whatever reason, and these are the notes that I wrote for that chapter.:

“What she’s been told, what she picks up on, and what she knows.
Frightened. Worried.
Feeling like her world is falling apart.
Feeling like it’s all her fault.
Wishing she could make it all right again.
She isn’t having any fun anymore.
Can’t we just go home?”

Those are the notes that I made about that chapter and that became Chapter 23.

Oh, what happens if something similar you’ve had planned for a future chapter or other story randomly occurs on the show or in another writer’s fic? Well, right now, I don’t read a lot of writers’ fics. I’m so far behind on fic, it’s not even funny. I keep up with Dax’s, The Courtship of Emma’s Mother, because, my god, that is a brilliant piece. I keep up with Wither Thou Goest, oh, and her name is going to escape me. Crap! I’m sorry! I just read the other piece the other day! Umm… Hold on a minute. I can find it really quickly. Anyway, I keep up with Whither Thou Goest, and I also read a lot of Gillian_Kane’s work, which are not episodic, usually. Oh, Whither Thou Goest is written by Geekgirllurking. I keep up with Fewthistle’s work, obviously, but also not episodic in nature. That’s all that I keep up with, routinely. So, if somebody else is going to be putting something in their fic that I have planned for Hide Beside Me, I might not be aware of it, and since I’m not watching the show right now, in order to save my vision for Hide Beside Me, I may not be aware of that either.

The really interesting thing is several things have shown up in the show after I have written them. [Laughter] Just little things, like, I wrote the scene in South Dakota where Natalia gets strawberry pie on her lip and Olivia reaches across the table in the Buffalo dining room, swipes it off with her thumb, licks her thumb, and then they’re both sort of shocked that that has happened. A couple weeks later, there was the peanut butter scene, on canon! Then, I had a scene that happened in a hotel room. I don’t know if it was in South Dakota or sometime later, where the girls have a king-sized bed and Emma is sitting in between them, they’re going to watch movies. A couple weeks later on the show, the spa happened, and Emma shows up, and they’re going to sit on the bed and watch movies. And then the Mary Poppins stuff. I had not posted yet, but had written most of the scene where actually, they’re watching the movie, and the movie happens to be Mary Poppins, and I had written it two days before 4/14, which is when Olivia, at her graveside confession to Gus, refers to Natalia as “the eternally cheerful Mary Poppins.” And so, those things have happened, but they’ve happened after the fact. Since I’m not watching the show right now, then it’s not going to be a big deal to me because I’m not going to see it.

I sincerely doubt that the show is going to have any of my current chapters planned for its show. I would be very surprised. Hide Beside Me is kind of unique in the way that I, as far as I know anyway, from what I’ve read, that I’ve sheared off from a particular point in time canon-wise, and I’ve changed nothing except for the activities of basically four people. That’s what’s driving this story: Phillip, Olivia, Emma, and Natalia. So I don’t see a lot of other people choosing that particular path to go down.

I have been asked to put in this question. Will Frank die in Hide Beside Me? I mean, you have to admit that’s a valid question. Please tell me he won’t die as the ‘good man’?

Ok, Frank does not die in Hide Beside Me. There will be two deaths in Hide Beside Me. I will not tell you who, but neither one of those people is Frank. He will not, however, be the “good man”. I don’t particularly believe Frank Cooper is a good man. I don’t believe he’s a bad man. I just think he’s a man, and I think that he is subject to all the petty jealousies and all the “I’m so pissed at Olivia”s and all that crap that I’ve already written him having.

I think that he is, essentially, an insecure man. I think that he is full of himself, to a certain extent, and that he became a cop in a small town because he likes power and he doesn’t have it in his life. He has created an artificial sense of power by becoming a cop in his town, and I think that his aversion to powerlessness is actually what drives him more than anything. I think it’s also why he, in the show, routinely underestimated and sold short Natalia, treating her as the little woman who could cook and clean and sew or whatever, and failing to recognise that this was a woman who would also put herself and her son basically through life on their own. From the age of sixteen, she was able to utilise resources to keep them alive and healthy and solvent, without resorting to criminal activity all those years. How impossibly difficult that must have been for her, and yet, he completely ignores that part of her life in the show.

He is, essentially, an insecure, self-centered man who really is not a bad man. He’s not evil. He’s just misguided. And so, no, my Frank will not end up the “good man”. You can relax, there’s no need to worry about me going down that road.


Hang in there purple peeps! One more part to go! Even more details about "Hide Beside Me" to follow. Stay tuned!

As always, thank you to Katie for transcribing and Xan and Badger for editing advice.


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This Wonky Paper Clip

I'm fiddling around with this wonky paper clip I found near my bed today. It's bent slightly, looking as if it was given too much of a load to hold together. It's not broken, just...wonky. Out of sorts I guess, like a piano player who broke their foot but still knows how to play the trumpet. Ok, bad analogy. Forgive me tonight. Just for tonight.

This wonky paper clip looks like it was put under too much strain. Too much was expected of it, too much was required from it, too many hopes and dreams were placed on this paper clip. And now it's wonky. Bent and out of sorts.
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An Insight into the World of Fan Fiction: Part Three

Here's part two of Otalia fan fiction author DiNovia's interview with me. Enjoy!


Just like the story on Guiding Light, Otalia fan fiction has had its positives and negatives. What are your thoughts on Otalia fan fiction at the moment, in light of the current story arc that has been formulated on the show?

Ok, that’s an excellent question. I’m not fond of the storyline as it stands after June the 22nd; doesn’t make me a very popular person right now. [Laughter] Or at least, it’s not a popular opinion. But I don’t like it. I think that it was a mishandled idea. I think that it would have been more aptly played, more deftly played, if they had done it after the wedding, rather than four months later. To be honest, as a writer, I think it is sloppy writing, or lazy writing. I think it makes use of clichés that weren’t necessarily needed here. I understand there were logistics issues with Jessica Leccia’s absence due to her maternity leave. However, I think that there were a number of options for them to play with, and that having chosen the one that they did and placed it in the way that they did, I think it did a disservice to the characters. That’s what’s most important to me as an author, the characters, especially these two.



I think that fan fiction can help heal a fandom that is beset by these conflicts, as it were, because there are differing opinions about this particular storyline. There are certainly others with opinions that say that this is excellent for this couple, and so dramatic and so aptly played, and yes, of course, the actresses are doing wonderful work with what they’ve been given, I certainly agree with that and would never say otherwise. Fan fiction can show an alternate way of having to deal with it. And that is actually why my friend Fewthistle and I created Burning City, which is an Otalia fan fiction, art, and video community that, as its premise, restricts artists and video artists and authors from using any canon having to do with the Otalia storyline, post June 22nd. Meaning, no reference to the pregnancy scare and no pregnancy issues at all. Other things from canon, such as Phillip’s illness or Natalia working for Blake, or those sorts of things, are certainly up for grabs, but the one main issue or premise for this community was to stop it at 6/22, as far as the Otalia storyline went. I think that the storyline on screen presents a very interesting challenge for authors. We, at Burning City, have chosen one way to deal with it.

Certainly there are other valid ways to deal with it, such as writing the storyline into fan fiction and attempting to repair the damage that has so obviously been done to this couple by speculating what’s going to happen when Natalia returns. I find it very difficult to read those pieces right now, but I do read them. There are four authors whose works I would read if they chose to deal with that particular subject. One of them is my dear friend Bronzey, who is doing a fabulous job with this particular aspect of the storyline and I enjoy reading her story very much. Another one is one of my betas, Megan, who has asked me to beta for her a story that deals with this particular storyline and how she has chosen to resolve it. So, there are absolutely many different ways that fan fiction can be used during this time to help fans deal with their issues regarding the storyline because we are a family, and we pride ourselves on that.

I was reading Coming Undone last night, and I was just amazed at how you could just get inside Olivia’s head and write as if you were her. How do you get inside their heads like that? How do they even stay there? There must be four corners to your mind to keep all those women in there and yourself!

This is where I get to talk a little bit about what makes DiNovia, DiNovia. I am a theater major. I have a degree in theater. Although my particular major emphasised stage management and directing, I had to be on stage a number of times as part of the program. One of my favorite parts about acting is to be able to create a character, based on a script, and extrapolate from that script how the character would react in certain situations and incorporate that into your whole being. I tended more towards method acting. Although, I drew the line at like, if I had an injury, actually injuring myself to find out what it felt like. But my choice in acting was to take my character and write a journal in their voice. Not just a journal about what was happening in the script, but also a journal page or three from their childhood, from their future, taking the script and making it a baseline, but extrapolating both the past and the future for this character.

From that, I learned that I could use that in my writing. I find myself writing in first person perspective more for the genre of Otalia than any other fandom I’ve ever written for. Which I believe is interesting. In Hide Beside Me, I write Olivia, Emma and Natalia in first person. I find Natalia the hardest, even though I’m possibly more like her or, well, Fewthistle would say I am the Natalia, so being like a character doesn’t necessarily make her easy to write when it’s first person perspective.

I find I write Olivia the easiest. I can get inside her head like nobody’s business. I can hear her snark. I can hear her pain. I can hear her fear. I don’t quite understand, actually, unless it’s just a case of opposites. That she is opposite of me, but yet, we share a common history of damage that maybe I’m able to get into her head a little easier.

The one that surprises me the most is how well received my interpretation of Emma is. Emma, as you know, is eight, and to write first person perspective of an eight year old is…well I’m never quite sure I’m going to get it. I’m never quite sure when I come up to an Emma chapter that I’m going to be able to recreate the first one and be able to hear her in my head again, and yet, she never fails me. So I am very surprised that I am able to get Emma on the page consistently because as a character, it’s hard to follow her. She’s not a consistently used character, and she’s not consistently portrayed, so the fact that I am able to create a consistent eight year old who sounds like Emma to other people is very gratifying.

It is difficult to write in first person perspective. It can be very difficult if you can’t hear the voice of the person you’re trying to write, and that’s the next chapter, and you can’t move on with the story until you get that chapter. I had that problem with Natalia a lot early on in Hide Beside Me. Or in general, even when I wrote third person omniscient, past tense, with Natalia in Captured for the Queen to Use, I found myself listening, over and over, to clips of her. Not watching, but listening, to get her cadence down, to get her word choice down, to get her pauses. My God, that character has more pauses and changes in thought and pace in sentences than I’ve ever had the unfortunate necessity to write. In fact, I was joking about this with Fewthistle the other day when she was expressing she was having problems writing Natalia as well, and I said, “Really, honestly. Just throw in a couple of double-dashes and some ellipses and you’ll be fine.” But that’s really too simplistic. It’s very difficult to get Natalia’s voice down and her word choice down and all of that.

It’s gratifying when I get told, “How do you keep these characters in your head that well? How do you get their voices down so well?” I wish I knew. It’s some sort of strange alchemy of my training and my level of empathy. I do have a heightened sense of perception where people’s emotions are concerned. I always have, ever since I was a small child. So I think it’s a strange alchemy of just natural empathy, the ability to empathise, the training that I received in acting and a writer’s ear. I think it just comes together and makes something happen that’s wonderful.

Why did you get started on writing Otalia fanfic? Why do you continue to write for us fans?

Wow, well, I would have to say that, although I hesitate to use the word “blame”, the blame does fall to Destini, our fearless leader at Big Purple Dreams. Destini and I have been in similar groups for many, many years. She used to run Alternative Quadrant, back when I was writing in Voyager days. We knew each other online, and still it’s only online. I have not had the pleasure of meeting her. We have been kind of circling each other all this time, and I have had a livejournal account for years now, and she friended me and we’ve been on each others’ livejournal accounts as friends for, I would say, a good three years, at least. And so, what happens with livejournal is you check every day to see what your friends are doing.

And around January – December and January – I kept seeing these Youtube clips of something that she was defining as “Otalia,” and I was like, “Ok, I don’t know what this is,” and so a couple of blurbs underneath said, you know, Guiding Light and I was like, “Ah, a soap opera! I wasn’t aware that Guiding Light was doing a lesbian storyline like All My Children was doing.” So 20 years previous, I had stopped watching soap operas cold turkey and never went back. And, so I was like, “Oh, a soap opera. I’m not interested in that!”

So, I continued to ignore the clips. And then, there was one. It turns out it was from January 13th, 2009. The episode was known as “Family Day.” I believe that’s what it’s known as online. The scene was Natalia, Olivia and Emma trying to get Emma out the door for family day. It’s the scene that ends with “You deserve it, Mom!” – the cookie, and I knew nothing about these characters. I didn’t know who belonged to whom, what was going on, why they were there, who the child was, anything. And I watched the scene, and I extrapolated from the scene that Emma was Natalia’s child and that Olivia was Natalia’s live-in lover and that Guiding Light had gone much further in a lesbian storyline than I had ever seen on television before. That’s what I extrapolated from that one scene. I was wrong, on every level, except the names of the characters. At least I got those right. But underneath it Destini had said, “I’m falling in love right along with them.” And you know what? It didn’t take me long to figure that out.

Like I said about what types of fan fiction I like, there are three ways to get me involved in a storyline very fast. Hurt/comfort. I also like redemption stories. Recreating yourself and finding your way. Those stories, I love that. Then the third thing that will get me every time is a child. And lord mercy, Otalia has a child. Emma sucked me in, while Destini got me hooked. You know, started me off, pushed that stuff on me like a drug, and boy, oh boy, Otalia is a virus or a drug or an addiction or an obsession or whatever else you want to call it. Emma kept that going for me. She really got me hooked on the pairing and how those two women reacted and interacted with that child in that one little clip just sealed the deal for me.

Why do I continue to write for the fans? Well, first of all, who wouldn’t want to write in this fandom? I have to say that the Otalia fandom is different from any other fandom I’ve ever been involved in, ever. And I mean that. I was stunned at how quickly I became addicted to Otalia. I was flabbergasted when that addiction led me to stop eating; to stop doing almost anything. Unfortunately, at the time, I was working full time and going to school full time. It was unheard of that I would be so enamored of any fandom that I would forget to eat. I would stay up 24 hours, just to watch clips, to write, to talk to the fans, oh my god, the fans! How could you not write for this fandom? That’s what I want to know. If you have any sort of writing skill whatsoever, if you love Otalia, this fan base is the most vibrant, the most organised, the most loving and connected fan group I have ever been involved in. I can’t tell you how many friends I have made and how my life has been changed by the fan base. Not just the actresses, but the fan base has been so generous and so kind and so supportive, not just of my work, but of me, as a human being! So yeah, that’s why I write for you fans. Because you? You guys rock.

Do you have a muse or are you just inspired by the characters on the show?

I do have a muse, and if any of you are familiar with the movie Tank Girl, starring Laurie Petty, I call my muse “Tanked Muse.” And basically, when I interact with Tanked Muse, because I do interact with her, she is generally Laurie Petty, dressed as Tank Girl, with a bottle of Bombay Sapphire or some other very expensive alcohol, in her hand, swigging from it and telling me what to write. She and I have had arguments. She and I have had disagreements. A notorious one is that, very early on in my writing for Otalia fandom, I wrote ten ficlets to music. The challenge was to take your iPod, put it on shuffle and write a story for the first ten songs. The tenth song that came up for me when I did that was Melissa Etheridge’s “Sleep,” and Tanked Muse took off and started writing and I was typing until I realised that it was a death scene, a major character death scene. It was an Olivia death scene and my throat closed up and I started to weep. I couldn’t get past the first paragraph, knowing what was coming, because she told me the whole story, how it was going to end and I could not deal with it. She has been told we don’t do death scenes and she still comes around to suggest them every once in a while, and I just ignore her. But yes, I do interact with my muse.

I know that sounds odd. She can be recalcitrant, she can be silent. She spent years silent. She can be fun. She can be overbearing. But she is always creative, and she is the kind of me that I’m not. I am much more professional, much more organised, much more even-keeled, much more quiet and cautious and compassionate than my muse is. She’s the brash part of me, the brash side of me, that I don’t get to express very often, and I think I need that in order to break through to get the writing. It’s important to have a muse, so yeah. I am very much inspired by the characters of the shows that I have written for. But I’ve been inspired by characters before and have not actually ended writing for those fandoms, so it really depends on what’s going on and what I feel I can give to the fandom and what I feel not qualified to do. For instance, I have been inspired by the characters on Saving Grace, and yet, I choose not to write for Saving Grace because I just don’t feel I could do it justice. I don’t think it’s my genre, but I’ll read it.


There you go DiNovia lovers, that's part two of her interview with me. Again, I'd like to thank Katie Kelly for transcribing the interview as well as Xan and Badger for the editing advice. Also for those who can't wait for the next instalment, I predict two more editions after this one (including tid bits about "Hide Beside Me"!)
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An Insight into the World of Fan Fiction: Part Two

Following on from that great interview with Otalia fan fic author and fan, DJ Shiva (which you can find here: http://julesypops.blogspot.com/2009/07/insight-into-world-of-fan-fiction-part.html) I now am so pleased to be able to finally start posting my interview with "Hide Beside Me" author, DiNovia.

Now those of you who are unfamiliar with DiNovia won't be out of the loop any longer because this amazing woman was so open and honest with me that you will feel like you've been given an all access pass into her mind. She's a fantastic writer and a dear friend of mine so I hope after this you will see exactly why everyone who meets her or reads her work cannot help but adore her.

For those of you who are familiar with DiNovia will know exactly what I am talking about when I say, "GODDESS OF OTALIA FAN FIC!!!" So I don't feel I need to go on any further about that!

Before I get into the interview part of this blog, let me tell you a little bit about her most prominent of works for the Otalia fandom, "Hide Beside Me". Now I was sitting here trying to condense the story of "HBM" in two sentences...and found I couldn't. So I asked my lovely editor for this series of blogs, Xan, and she said to me, "Olivia and Natalia are on the run. Phillip is crazy. Dinah rocks." So there you have it!

Now I'm going to stop blabbering on and get straight into the interview. It will be in about 3 or 4 parts because it's so meaty and I've been told by many a DiNovia fan to not edit out too much of her words. So you may only get two or three questions per blog because the questions I asked required very detailed answers. Kill me later!

Here we go!


How are you doing today Di?

I am doing well. Thank you. [Laughter] I’ve had a moderately productive day. Had to restart my computer and restore some things, so that was a little frustrating, but other than that, doing ok. It’s a Sunday, so beautiful day out. Thank you.

Alright, so, first off, what does fan fic mean to you, as just a fan, as well as an author of fan fiction?

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An Insight into the World of Fan Fiction: Part One

Fan fiction (as defined by Urban Dictionary) is written by fans within a fandom for other fans. Generally, the author uses the characters and/or the settings from the original work to write a new or continuing story. Fan fic, as it is often shortened to, took off in the 1960s with Star Trek fan fiction springing up in fanzines.

The way I see it is that fan fiction is attached to every story, whether that story belongs to film, television, comic or novel. The reason for this is that every viewer or reader has their own perspective of what they enjoy or dislike about a particular story or character. Some may share perspectives and thus springs the demand for new interpretations of how the characters or storylines from the original work should be written.

Quite often, fan fiction served as an alternate universe to the original work. Characters who would not normally be involved in stories could associate. Characters with preexisting history in the original work could have their story shaped into new tangents. This allowed fans the opportunity to write and read the ideal plotlines that would never have made the cut in the original work, such as adding more graphic sexuality in between characters.

This brings me to the fandom in which I read fan fic about most often- Otalia.

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A View from a Soap Whore

Ok so I have been watching soaps from the womb basically. My earliest memories were watching Days of Our Lives with my mother, followed by The Young and the Restless with my metzmums (grandmas for those Armenian challenged). To top all that off, all four of us would sit down and watch The Bold and the Beautiful in the late afternoon. I grew up watching soaps. Soaps were, and still are, my only constant in life. I have lived and breathed soap opera and I am not ashamed to admit it.

It was watching soaps with my metzmums that I fully realised the power of soaps to engage with their viewers. These two elderly women knew next to nothing English and yet they would still be able to explain to their little enthusiastic granddaughter exactly what was going on just based on purely watching facial expressions. Dialogue aside, they could explain who was sleeping with who, who was carrying another persons baby, which character was blackmailing another...every plot point was explained in perfect detail. How is that possible? How is it possible for two women who knew no English to be able to understand a whole show and its characters. 


I see this as the universal language of soaps. The ability of soaps to reach all viewers, all people. Perhaps one could argue that when one is schooled on the history of soaps and has watched it for many many years, soap conventions become like a second language. My grandmothers knew no English, I barely knew Armenian, but they knew soap and they taught me soap (as did my mother but she knows English so it was a much easier with her, but I digress).

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