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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