TrekGirl welcomes Jane St Clair.  I wasn't sure if Jane would agree to be interviewed by me for several reasons--all of which included an inferiority complex of one kind or another.  But enough of my problems. :-)

When I sent Jane the interview questions I had a mental image of  her being a very forthright individual who wouldn't tolerate any crap.  From her answers I think you will find that she is at least outspoken--so prepare for some adult language.  As for the "no crap," well, I'd like to think I didn't given her any reason to test that theory. ;-)

Enjoy....

TrekGirl asks:

How would you describe yourself?

I'm a grad student in English, early 20s (OK, 22), Canadian, bisexual,
laid-back, and content to live for the moment with my very cool parents.  Child of an artist and a hard-core feminist, terminal bookworm with a short attention span and a tendency to change fandoms the way other people change socks (I don't wear socks except when it's really, really cold; I'm just a barefoot kind of girl).

How long have you been writing?

Um, I figured out the mechanics of it when I was about four, and the creative possibilities maybe a year or so after that.  I think I was nine when I figured out that a writer was something you could *be*.  Before that my preferred career was either cowboy -- cowgirls wore skirts and I was never very good in those -- or veterinarian.
I wrote in the backs of my notebooks and the margins of my homework and on all the scrap paper in the house and with an old manual typewriter my grandfather gave me.  When I was fifteen, I won a small writing contest and was hooked for life.

I wrote my first fanfic story at the age of nine; it was Trek (TNG) and featured a seriously Mary Sue female.  Then I stopped and didn't think about fanfic again until late 1997, when the concepts of fandom and fanfic was explained to me by a newly acquired friend in the course of a very long bus ride.  I posted my first fanfic piece in January of 1998.
Since then, I've written fanfic  in  TOS and  Voyager  (and crossovers into TNG), X-Files, Star Wars Ep I, and Velvet Goldmine.  I have ideas and
fragments of stories for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Highlander, Hard Core Logo, and Lawrence of Arabia  (but don't count on 'em ever being finished or anything).

I know you've written for both Voyager and TOS, and setting aside that you've also delved into X-Files and Star Wars (Phantom Menace) fic, what is your preferred fandom and why?

Well, at the moment my preferred fandom is Phantom Menace, but in the
Trekverse, it's TOS.  Both for pretty much the same reasons.  They were the universes of my childhood fantasies, but they also have a very autumnal feel to them, because they represent a "previous" generation, and so everything is coloured with the understanding that "this too shall pass."  I think it also gives them a bit of an epic tinge, in that characters who come later in the chronology are aware that these were their larger-than-life fore bearers.  Plus I like how easily I can incorporate ritualistic elements into them (Jedi tradition and Spock's Vulcan-ness both lend themselves to that nicely).

If this is not part of the previous answer, why write about Star Trek?

It's the fandom I was in each time I took up writing fanfic.  Honest truth.  And since then because the universe I've created for my K/S stories still nags at me.

Who are your favourite characters and what drew you to write about them?

Spock, because I love his alien-ness.  It gives simple things a new edge.  I don't often write from his point of view, though, because I like observing him as much as immersing myself in him.

Seven of Nine, for some of the same reasons.  She looks (mostly) human, but her ways of thinking are very alien.  Emotionally, she's not much more than a child, and in some ways  that's  very  disturbing,  particularly in  that  it's coupled with such an intense sexuality (I have dreams of a universe where Seven gets to wear something black and a good deal looser until she comes to terms with herself).

You've written a few relationship pairings, please share with me which pairing has been your favourite to write for and why?  How would you describe the relationship(s) in canon and in your own fictional interpretation?

Kirk/Spock, because their relationship is  tinged  with  Spock's semi-alien
consciousness, and because I can see it as the driving force behind more than a couple of events in the movies.  And because they get old.  I find that fascinating: usually, fanfic characters are  young,  or  deliberately  made younger to please the author and/or audience.   I'd rather have them middle-aged or older.

And to a lesser extent, Janeway/Seven of Nine, because I'm fascinated by the power issues between them.  And because Seven's almost complete lack of socialization makes her a strange being who I think is unlikely to fall into the kind of conventional sexuality that the show's writers keep providing for her.

What do you think makes for a good story?

Believable characterization.  I think you can make a character believable even if your perception of him/her varies from most people's  (I have to believe this; I've done it).  It's essential, though, that  you  ground  your variation of that character into what your reader already knows.  And some kind of emotional resonance, letting your character really observe and feel instead of simply positioning him/her and making him/her speak.

Some kind of progression of events.  Doesn't have to be a big plot (who am I to demand such things?), but navel-gazing on a single emotion interests me not at all.

Good technical writing.  I've forgiven maybe two writers for major spelling problems, and that's my limit for one life.  Substituted homonyms (their/there, effect/affect) make me livid.  But what I really love is someone whose grammar lets a story *move* and develop a rhythm -- variety in sentence length and structure (ditto for paragraphs), constructions that match the mood of the piece.

When you read another author's fan fiction what do you look for?  Are these elements to be found in your own work?

I know I've found a readable fanfic story when I can't substitute names,
change a handful of details, and produce a story in a different fandom.

Other than that, I love angst.  I'm a total angst-junkie, but not if it's gratuitous.   I'd  rather  have  a  brilliantly  characterized  bout  of nobody-loves-me than a lengthy but questionable torture piece.

I'll read anything that's extremely well-written, regardless of content.

You'll find angst here and there in my writing, yes.  I make no claims as to quality. <g>

Do your stories have a theme, such as loss, belonging, abandonment etc.  What are they?

Um.  Not really.   Unless  you  count  the  growth  in  a  character's self-understanding that eventually allows them to love another person.  And angst.

What is the appeal, to you, of writing slash (same sex) stories?

The conventions of het relationships are so well-established that they might as well be written in stone.  For the most part, I find boy-and-girl-meet, boy-and-girl-fuck stories supremely uninteresting.   Because  slash relationships exist outside that set of rules, you have a lot more leeway to write both the relationship and the development of the characters that leads to it.  (Incidentally, most of my het stories feature a dominant female for pretty much the same reason.)

Do you feel let down by the makers of Star Trek for not promoting, or dealing with any serious homosexual issues or characters within any of the various series, especially those produced from the 90's to date? If so, why, and what do you think it would take for TPTB to make good on their promise to actually deal with this issue?

Only to the extent that it represents a lack of maturity on their part.  By not acknowledging that their characters might not be straight, they keep the show in a kind of terminal adolescence, where boys and girls make eyes at each other only.  Besides that, they frequently don't do justice to the performances their actors offer.  In at least a couple of cases (Julian Bashir on DS9, Seven of Nine on Voyager), the need to push the character into heterosexuality reduces them to two-dimensional cut-outs.

I haven't got the faintest idea what might convince TPTB to change their minds, since I haven't got much faith in the American media in general where portrayals of homosexuality are concerned.  Sell Trek to Warner, maybe, and let the makers of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' have a got at it.  They seem to be doing fairly well.

Is there a particular reason why your writing for Trek has become a little sparse in the last year or so, and can you tell me what those specific reasons are?

I jumped fandoms.  A couple of times, actually.  I think I mentioned that I have a short attention span.  And the Phantom Menace slashdom has me pretty thoroughly by the throat.  Plus I'm busier now with academic work, and my writing outside fandom.  I think it might be a tribute to my interest in Kirk/Spock that I still write Trek at all.

I'd like to share an example of your writing style, please choose a scene from one of  your completed works and describe what you are trying to achieve in the snippet (dialogue or narrative direction).

This is is the first couple of pages of my K/S story "Wednesday Morning,
3am."  My favourite of the stories I've written, actually, because I think it grasps both the mature relationship between them and the problems with it.  It also contains one of my personal quirks, the stream of consciousness passage.

From "Wednesday Morning, 3am"....

The first night, he'd paced and shifted, unable to sleep. He couldn't remember when he'd been so hot. The Enterprise's climate control dropped the temperature sharply during ship's night, so that he was always ready to bury himself under layers of bedding and sleep like that, nested. Six months before, he'd been on
Vulcan, but the dryness of the air had undercut the heat so much that more often than not he was off-balance and almost shivering. And in the Vulcan night, the
temperature would fall so far that he needed blankets and a searingly warm body to wrap his own around.

A bedmate was something he hadn't had in weeks. Spock had beamed down with him, quietly accepting the offer of a home during shore leave, but settled himself in the guest room without consulting Kirk on the matter. Maybe twice in their ten days on Earth so far, Spock had come with him on his walks. Kirk was surprised how much it comforted him. The Vulcan was always a low, steady presence in the back of his mind, but his physical proximity made the connection vivid. He'd lived in Iowa since childhood, and only the alienness of Spock's experiences could make the place immediate for him again. He'd been content to walk with his eyes almost closed, feeling Spock's

alien wetness searing green blue sky air like a living body air like something breathing all these layers of humidity that have to be pushed aside like curtains small insects deep gold colour of Jim's hair his eyes like the grass drying sudden
birds trees houses in the distance things living home t'hy'la the liquidness of you

thoughts. They'd been lovers for so long they forgot to touch for days sometimes. Never this long before, but Spock was touching on something that Kirk didn't have words for, and he had to breathe deeply, hope for patience and wait.

The thunderstorm had woken him. Sound came in through the windows and drove him up out of sleep so violently that Kirk started to his knees, hyperventilating. The next thunder strike was farther away, less startling, but he was fully conscious by that time and conscious that he was cold. He shook himself to get rid of the last of his fear and got out of bed, padded over to the big closet and dug in it in the dark until he found a blanket. The first night, he'd stripped the bed in his room as well as setting up the fan. Now he was only too grateful for the patchwork sensation of the quilt under his fingers. Wrapping it around his shoulders, he found his jeans, still in the dark, and pulled them on.

The house had been his alone for almost five years. His mother had died, not suddenly, and certainly not unexpectedly. She'd been of an age for it, and he hadn't been able to begrudge her that peace, though he'd cried for her more than once and still felt her absence. In his mind, the Iowa house was hers even more than simply his family home. Peter (Sam's son, Sam who was dead, who wasn't something Kirk wanted to think about) hadn't visited it since he'd grown out of being a child and become a young man with a life of his own. Kirk hadn't had shore leave on Earth since the funeral until this trip, and he'd had to think about it long and hard before he'd decided to come home.

He'd been relieved that Spock had agreed to come with him. They hadn't fought, but there had been a silence growing between them that even late night psychic caresses weren't bandaging. He was damned if he knew what he'd done wrong. In any other relationship, he might have pushed, but there wasn't any sense of disturbance, only distance. Not anger, he thought. Just stillness.  And his own growing restlessness as he missed his lover.

He'd grown up in this house, and he could find his way in it well enough without the benefit of illumination. For some reason, he was as reluctant to turn the lights on as he was to forcibly break the silence between Spock and himself. He paused on the stairs for a second, getting a sense of the house in the dark. Most of the furniture was in storage to keep it from being damaged, and what was left gave the house a cabin feeling of improvisation and unfinishedness. The wooden stairs
slanted downward a little. At the base of them, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror by the door, a middle-aged man wrapped in a quilt and a pair of jeans, barefoot in the empty house.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the next lightning flash, counted the seconds until thunder hit.  Coffee, he thought. He could make coffee, watch the storm through the porch screens. No one would miss him if he wanted to sleep on the porch swing instead of in bed.

The kitchen was a dozen steps away. Once, he brushed the door frame with his hip and blushed a little at his own clumsiness on his home ground. To reassure himself, he kept moving in the  dark,  finding a mug and the  coffee  filter,  filling  the old-fashioned steam kettle from the kitchen tap. Drops of water on the kettle's sides hissed as they touched the burner. His parents had never added food synthesizers to the kitchen appliances, and by his teen years he'd considered cooking to be a vaguely mediational activity.

It was the sound of breathing that finally alerted him. He twisted from the waist and made out Spock seated at the kitchen table, watching him. Startled, he spilled the tablespoon of ground coffee onto the counter. The smell was as much of a shock to him as the sudden presence, and it was that that made him jump.

"Jesus, Spock!" He cupped a hand under the counter ledge and brushed the loose coffee into it, lifted the hand to his nose to smell the mess before throwing it away. A second later, he realized he must have brushed the quilt through it, because he could still smell dry coffee close to his face. "You move like a cat, you know that? You're going to be the death of me."

"I apologize, Jim. I was under the impression that you knew I was here."

Kirk snorted. "It wouldn't hurt to announce yourself when you came in."

"I was seated here when you entered." A raised eyebrow, his lover's equivalent of laughter. He could feel the amusement tugging at his thoughts across the bond.

Oh. "I think I need that coffee." The kettle whistled and he lifted it.
The water running through the filter made a soft nose that was almost drowned out by the rain. He repeated the process, waited for the water to drain, and moved the filter to the sink without looking back at his lover, then poured out two cups and
handed one to Spock. The Vulcan accepted it ceremoniously, though Kirk knew he seldom actually drank the stuff. In the decade they'd known each other, he'd watched Spock develop an aesthetic appreciation for Kirk's addiction, inhaling the fumes and tasting it softly, though rarely drinking an entire cup.

Spock followed him onto the porch. The space was screened against the insects that whistled around the house at other times, and roofed against the rain. Kirk would have liked Spock's body curled against his on the porch swing, but the Vulcan settled himself in one of the wicker chairs set against the house's wall and
only watched Kirk inquisitively.

He hated this silence. He'd become awkward in the presence of the man who owned the largest part of his soul. Spock was preternaturally still, a slender body in dark clothes that were neither formal nor in any real way of Earth. God, he wanted that body against him. He wasn't adequately dressed, really, and he would have loved the other man's heat close to his own.

.... End of Scene

The stream of consciousness  passage  (you'll have notice it -- it  was  the strange punctuation-less bit offset in the middle of a paragraph) is a quirk of mine.  I use it to express  that  the  characters  don't  think  in  complete sentences, but rather in impressions and concepts, fragments of ideas.  In the case of K/S, it also frequently reflects the low-level telepathic connection between them.

I usually write with minimal dialogue.  Kirk and Spock especially I think have a limited amount that they need to say -- they have their bond (yeah, I like the "bond" idea and use it freely -- ya wanna make somethin' of it?), which allows a fairly steady stream of low-key communication between them, and which intensifies when they're in close physical contact.  (I know this doesn't precisely reflect canon, in which Spock is a touch-telepath only, but I tend to play fast and loose with canon, especially in Trek.)  Which doesn't necessarily mean that they always understand each other, or even that they're perfectly aware of each other.  Some of Spock's concepts are very alien things to Kirk (I played with one or two language problems between them in "I Leave This at Your Ear") -- and vice versa, I suppose, though I haven't really
gone in that direction yet -- and  sometimes  there  just  isn't  enough information for them to figure out what's going on.

Do you consider yourself an improving writer or the finished article?

Improving, I hope.  If I'm not, it's time to find a different hobby.

How do you keep improving your skills, what help did/do you have?

I spent a year in formal study with an established poet and writer who put us through a lot of exercises and group-critiques.  Hard on the ego (the world's most intense beta combined with the Circle of Judgement), but good for development.  Besides that, I read outside fandom a lot, and I read the kind of writers who write they way I want to write someday (my tastes run to Michael Ondaatje and William Gibson, if anyone cares).

When I write, I tend to do it on the computer, but before I'm satisfied with a piece, I'll often have gone over it a couple of times in hard copy, checking how individual words fit together and how the thing moves when it's not read off a screen  (which I think encourages one to  skim  rather  than  read  in detail).  (Confession: not always.  There are times when I've been over sections of a story six or eight times already by the time it's finished, and a deep edit just seems like an unpleasant and unnecessary task.)

Do you consider beta readers a help or a hindrance and what do you expect from them?

When I use betas (which is only occasionally), it  a  quick  spelling  and grammar run-through.  Proof-reading, really, for the days when I'm not willing to print the thing out and spend a couple of days going over it by hand.

Is professional publication your goal or are you just having fun?

I've been published under my RL name here and there.

Which of your own stories would you recommend to the Internet reader and why?

Depends on the fandom.  In Trek, probably my K/S stories, because I think I've maintained a fairly high quality of writing with them, and because I think I've got the characters down fairly well.  Of all my stories, probably the Phantom Menace story "A Warm Place," because I think it's the deepest into a character's head that I've gone so far, and I like the contrast I managed to make between that and his physical environment.

You have a chance to recommend another fan fiction, not your own, what would it be and who is the author(s)? (consider any pairing or characters)

In Trek, I still have a soft spot for Jungle Kitty's work; Amirin's Voyager fics and torch's stuff, especially the "Sonnets" series.   Which is not to say that lots of other stuff isn't good, just that their work is what's stuck with me now that I've mostly wandered off.

In any fandom at all, I highly recommend Hiper Bunny's "Bonds of Choice"
series.  It's the most interesting and elaborate AU I've ever encountered.

Any other comments?

If ever you encounter a writer whose fanfic you love, follow them into any fandom they may choose to take up, even if it's not one you would have considered otherwise.  It's led me to strange and interesting places, and I've been  thrilled  with  what  I've  found  far  more  often  than  I've  been disappointed.

Readers, forgive me as I go off on a tangent with Jane--I hope you don't mind...

Thinking about some of your answers here, it's obvious to me that you know you're a good writer.  This begs the question, how do you know, as a writer, that you are good or have talent or potential for the written word?

From a fan fic perspective some might say you know (or have an idea) of your
talent through feedback, but feedback is such a subjective thing and frequently
(but not always) it only seems to serve as a massage to the ego of the writer.
Obviously you can only answer for yourself, but do you think it is something you
are born with, a kind of innate knowledge that writing is what you should do?

There's an interview somewhere in which they asked Oliver Stone if he'd ever had a homosexual experience, and he laughed.  Can you just write that Jane laughed?

I could... but, where's the fun in that?

Seriously, that's one hell of a question, and I'm not sure there's any way I can answer it without getting myself in trouble.

I don't think there's any real way you can know that you're a "good writer", though having someone whose opinion you respect tell you spontaneously is nice.  I have this nagging suspicion that I'm actually a bad writer, and that no one had bothered to tell me because they don't want to hurt my feelings.

For the record: I think my feelings are getting on for numb.  I'd rather know if I'm doing something wrong.

Feedback is sweet, though.  Ooooh, yeah.

I don't know if writing is innate.  I think it probably isn't.  A certain amount of talent is helpful, but so's a lot of work.  I feel like writing is something I should do because the words are there when I reach for them, but they weren't always.  When I started writing seriously (as opposed to trying to stay awake in class) it was like pulling teeth.

Is there a question that you wished I had asked, if so what was it?

No, you now know everything there is to know about me (except the colour of my underwear and my skinny-dipping fantasies, but those are really beside the point right now).

Thanks Jane, it's been great chatting with you.

(Off camera, Jane reaches over and hugs TrekGirl)
 

The featured author's recommended own work :
Wednesday Morning, 3am; A Warm Place

E-Mail the featured author : Jane St Clair

The featured author recommends *you* read :
Jungle Kitty
Amirin's Voyager fics & Amirin's other site
Torch's Sonnets and more
Hiper Bunny's "Bonds of Choice" series.
 

 Complete the Circle