Interview with Dawson Rambo
By Megan Reilly (with Nicola Simpson)

First off, tell us a little bit about yourself.

I'm 34, married, and work in Northern California as an MIS Supervisor for a medium sized manufacturing company. I live with my wife, Annie, in a quiet neighborhood peopled mostly by retirees and families. I'm a Gemini. <grin>

How did you get into watching the X Files, and how did that lead to writing fanfiction?

I'd actually written fanfiction before the X-Files. When I was 17, way back in 1984, I was a huge "Magnum, PI" fan. Thomas Sullivan Magnum was my alter ego; I wanted to BE him when I grew up. I wrote a rather longish short story based around the Magnum character, complete with ninjas, car chases, gunfights, and what I thought was a "sex" scene. I showed it to my girlfriend at the time, Trish, and she told me I should be writing something original. So, the first time I wrote fanfic, my first "fan" didn't "get" it. In the 16 years since, not much has changed. Only true fanfic fans "get" fanfic. My family still doesn't understand.

Did you take the advice to write something original? Did you do any writing in the interim, or did the experience of not being understood put you off?

I wrote a short story for my high school literary journal and won honorable mention in a contest. I made a stab at a few hilariously bad novels...one was a serial killer novel, marking the first appearance of Dan Stone (more on him later.) The novel was *incredibly* bad, because the killer would leave a toy from a children's cereal box next to the bodies that he'd bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, leading the police to nickname him...get ready... Captain Crunch. (Get it? Cereal killer?) Even then, I wanted to write thrillers, because I admired the form and structure and pace and themes. I have a sincere love of the Hero story, and probably always will. But back then I was making ALL the mistakes that the articles in Writer's Digest talk about. Making the hero a superman, with zero flaws, strong-jawed, incredible lover, genius IQ, etc. But, in the same vein, I was also adhering to the conventions of the genre in that my hero, Dan Stone, couldn't begin to solve the case until he was ordered to turn in his gun and badge.

Fanfic was unknown to me as a genre at that time, when I was writing the Magnum stuff. Like *many* fanfic writers, I thought I was the only one nutty enough to write fiction based on characters created by someone else. A few years later, in my early 20s, I became aware of BBSes, and found Star Trek and Star Wars fanfic, but attributed that to the general "weenieness" of SciFi fans. I've never been a huge SciFi fan. I didn't become a Trekker until I was 24! So, no, the fact that my girlfriend didn't "get" my Magnum story had little impact on my writing.

I watched XF from the first episode. Towards the end of the first season, I wrote a story called "The XXX Files" for alt.sex.stories. Later, when I was deep into my fanfic stage, I rewrote "The XXX Files" as "The Seducer," and cleaned it up a bit. Also, like some of my more promising stories, "The XXX Files" was never finished. LOL.

I wrote a three-part fanfic called "Stalkers," which is still unfinished to this day around the end of the third season. I posted it to atxfc and got some... negative feedback. The main reason is because I had the characters "Dana"-ing and "Fox"-ing all over the place. What was funny was that I got blasted in email by some of the old-timers in fanfic, but on the group there was some encouragement. So, I ducked down and continued to watch the show.

And I read. A ton. I read a ton of fanfic between the end of the third season through about midway of the fourth season. Around January of that year (95 or 96, I think,) I sat down and wrote a vingette called "Snapshot," which was intended to be a one-shot deal.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Are you still writing fanfiction?

Not actively. I have plans to finish Ellipsis, but time constraints at this point in my life are harsh, as I'm starting my own business among some other things. But, I haven't officially "quit" the story yet, so there's still hope. I cancelled a few announced short stories like "Taken" and "Discovery," and have all about given up on the last installment of the "Renegade" series by XFBandit.

:)

Did you read so much fanfiction because you knew you wanted to write some, and wanted to fit in, or simply because you enjoyed it? What about fanfiction do you enjoy? How much has feedback affected the stories you've written?

I read fanfic because I was enraptured by the universe of the X-Files. And fanfic authors were doing things with the characters that I wanted to see on the show. Specifically, Mulder and Scully getting seriously busy in a hot-monkey-love sort of way. I've been a dedicated Shipper since Day One, (through the end of Season 7, I hasten to add... Season eight has left me a little...peeved.) I read because I love to read. I had no conscious desire to "fit in" aside from noting the standards of the genre.

I enjoy the creative freedom of Fanfic becuase you can hit the ground running; you can assume that your target audience already knows about Samanta, already knows about all the things that add texture and tone to the XF universe. You don't have to write 30 chapters of backstory. You can hit the ground running with YOUR story, and trust that your readers will be along for the ride. It's lean, mean, bare-metal storytelling when it's done right. It's trite character/situation regurgitation when it's done badly.

Feedback is always nice to get, and honestly, I've gotten more than my fair share of it. I remember clearly several newsgroup "wars" over feedback; Authors witholding later chapters in exchange for feedback, arguments whether or not feedback is warrented or required, and what is "good" versus "bad" feedback. In the end, I've gotten over 25,000 feedback emails. I've kept every single one, and I've tried to answer every single one. I've got a backlog of about 200 now that I've been meaning to answer for months. That may sound like a lot, 25K letters, but I hasten to point out that a large majority of them are from repeat writers, people I've established online friendships with. As a matter of fact, I met my wife through fanfic. She wrote me a letter for "ELS," and we started corresponding. Almost 3 years later we're happily married and so in love it's disgusting. In all the feedback I've gotten, maybe 10 actual letters were negative. I've been incredibly lucky in that regard, and I know it.

On your web site you have a few things that are unusual. For instance, you have "concept graphics" for not only the stories you've written, but for stories that didn't go past the idea phase. What's the story behind the graphics? And why did you decide to let your readers in on the stories that you wanted to write, but aren't going to? What has the reaction been?

The story behind the graphics is complicated. :) When the Novel Annex came up, and the idea of "dustjackets" was first raised, I was incredibly intrigued. I fully believe the movie posters should have their own Oscar categories, and I've loved them for years. I was really jazzed about doing my own, but discouraged at first because I don't consider myself very visually artistic.

I discovered in the process of creating my first dustjackets that it helped me visualize the story line; to find the ultimate theme of the piece I was writing. I love it when a movie poster totally captures the theme and tone of a movie; better still when it even captures the pace of a movie.

While teaching myself various techniques, and just playing around with my graphics software, I came up with some "posters" for stuff that I was considering writing, and stuff that I'd already written. The X-Files show itself (at least in the first seasons,) was such a visually stunning show that it seemed natural to blend that sort of thing in with fanfic.

Showing readers dustjackets/posters for stuff that I'd either decided not to write, or announced and then later cancelled was really a no-brainer for me. And I mean that literally; I didn't even consider what anyone might think. When I did give it some thouht, I realized that maybe I was hoping that someone would take my poster and write the story from it. Most of the stories that are on the "Never Written" page are fanfic stories that I'd love to read, but just don't have the time to write.

For the most part, the feedback was positive. A few letters arrived from people begging me to write those stories, and I was always polite in declining.

Who came first, Dawson or XFBandit in XF fic? How did the persona of XFBandit come about? How is the process of writing his stories different (voice, style, etc.)?

Dawson came loooooong before XFBandit. XFBandit appeared in 96 or 97, during the last phase of ELS. I'd written ELS during a long, dark, gloomy winter. I started sometime in October or November of that year, and wrote almost straight through until April. I'd written 24 chapters of what was, for me, both an incredibly dark and at the same time incredibly cathartic novel for me. One of the reasons I think ELS is some of my best work is that I've always considered myself a Scullyist, and that novel was All About Mulder in a lot of ways. Mulder and I share a darkness in the soul, a... difficult childhood with distant, complex parents. Writing some of the scenes in that novel was both incredibly hard, and incredibly wonderful for me at the same time. The scene in the book where Mulder stands before the mirror mentally berating himself for being such an asshole is something that I've done.

My primary "romantic" relationship at the time was breaking down as I was writing the last 9 chapters of ELS. After Chapter 24 was finished, I was kind of up against the wall. I knew I had to end the story, and I kind of knew how I wanted to end it, but I wasn't 100% sure. It took me almost a month to write that last chapter.

At that time, I was starting to get a lot of fan mail. Snapshot and Umbra had made me a fairly recognizable name in the fanfic community, and the short stories were doing great. Sixty was still generating a ton of fan mail, and almost all of it was very effusive.

At that time, because of the personal issues in my life, I had a severe replapse of something that has plagued me my entire life: Depression. I became convinced that artistically, I wasn't any good. I created XFBandit for two reasons; the first was the same reason that other authors have adopted psuedonyms; to see if there is a difference between being "good" and being "popular." I truly wanted to see if readers were responding to my writing, or to the "name."

Additionally, by that time I'd been kind of pigenholed as an MSR writer. When I wrote Convection, a story where Scully and Mulder do get together, but on terms that are less than romantic, I got a ton of emails telling me that I'd "betrayed" my readership. Now, in retrospect, I have a better handle on what those letters represented. At the time, I thought that I'd really done Something Bad. And the sticking part was that I wanted to say something different, in a new voice, in a new way. Thus XFBandit was born.

"Bandit" (as I call him,) was heavily influenced by the neo-noir author Andrew Vachss, author of "Flood," "Strega" and "Blue Belle," among almost a dozen other novels and two short story collections. His main character, Burke, was someone I could identify with, and that's how "XFBandit's" name became "Ed Burke" when I created the original AOL account to post "Burke's" stories from.

The process of writing XFBandit stories is kind of interesting. Bandit was free to do all the things that Dawson felt he couldn't. His stories are terse and dark and speak of lonely motel rooms, too much coffee at four in the morning and the dark rivers of two people's souls. It's about the real darkness, the darkness of lonliness and dispair, of depression and finding yourself caught in the most depressing circumstances imaginable. Bandit stories are cut-to-the-bare-metal stories; Short, chopped sentences, noir-style dialog. It has been said that the difference between a noir novel and a thriller novel is that in a noir novel, the hero *expects* to be double-crossed and to lose the heroine at the end. Bandit was a way, at first, to exorcise my demons, and then later, as a way-cool way to play with a different style.

And was there a difference between being popular and being good? How much work did you put into keeping the identities separate?

That's a hard question to answer, because it brings into the discussion my writer's ego. Every writer has an ego; some are healthier than others. The writer's ego is a fragile thing, because let's face it, we're putting a lot of ourselves out there. I desparately wanted to be considered "good" and not just popular. If I learned anything from the Bandit experience it was that the things I write make people happy when they read them. They challenge people and make them think. A writer can expect no higher praise than when someone says, "I don't agree with what you said, but it DID make me think." There is a huge difference between being good and being popular. From the feedback I got, I think I'm good. If that sounds egotistical, I'm sorry, but it's the truth.

At the beginning, I put a LOT of work into keeping Bandit and Dawson separate. But even at the beginning there were people that guessed. One of the giveaways was the formatting. I tended to format my ASCII text a very specific way back then, and people noticed the "*******" that I used for sectional breaks, and the eight-space indent, single-spaced, no-paragraph-break format that I like to use. I started geting emails at my StarNet email address about 2 hours after the first Bandit story hit the newsgroup. But I denied it. At first, I enjoyed it, the duplicity, the secrecy. But then it got to be a hassle, and I decided to out myself about seven months later. The response was a lot better than I thought it would be, and I've written things as "Bandit" since.

Since you mention depression -- how do you cope with it when it hits you and your writing? Did creating the Bandit persona help? Do you ever get writer's block?

I've done a lot of personal recovery work in the last 12 years, and my bouts of depression are now few and far between, and when the occur, they last minutes instead of weeks. The only restriction to my writing now is time! Creating the Bandit persona was incredibly cathartic, and I've never regretted it.

Writer's block? I get the opposite. I get vapor locked because there are so *many* stories I'd like to write, and 99% of them aren't in the fanfic arena. I want to write novels for real, live publication, and make a living as a novelist. I'm having a hard time deciding what the first novel should be; my recovery has taught me that when it's time to make that decision, I'll make it, and until then it's fine to just leave it up in the air.

You use an editor on your stories. How did you find him, and how does the editing process work for you?

Scott kinda found me. During the writing of Snapshot, it was kindly pointed out to me that I had a spelling problem. Back in those days, I was writing all my fanfic in Q-Edit, a DOS editor that I really, really liked. I was doing most of my writing on an old Dell 486 laptop. A reader offered to be my beta reader, and I decided that another pair of eyes wouldn't be an alltogether bad thing. She edited my work through the end of Snapshot, all of Umbra, and most of ELS. Scott Carr wrote me and we started talking about the process of writing, and he graciously offered to edit my work. He's been a godsend, because his input is invaluable. The editing process is, to me, part of the overall writing process. The way it works for me is that I'm usually a first-pass writer. When I sit down to write a chapter or a short story, I just write it, one pass, very few edits. I then send that as a text file to Scott, who sends it back with his edits, and suggestions and questions. The most we've ever sent back in forth is, I think, twice for a single short story (Renegade:Los Angeles, if I remember correctly.)

We've had some interesting debates about word choices. He still insists that "wallow" is not a good word, and that when a character of mine "wallows" in something, I'm comparing them to swine. While he is *technically* accurate, I believe in a more populist viewpoint: The English language is remarkably flexible and nimble. Of all the languages on Earth, it's the one with the single largest vocabularly, and the vocabulary is evolving every day. I tend to write the way I hear people speaking, and Scott is a staunch language conservative. When it comes down to it, though, as author I have the final word and he respects that.

I've gone back and forth on the whole "beta reading" thing, because I've had a lot of people offer to beta my stuff. As a writer, I believe that soliciting opinions about *what* you're writing is not a good thing. Getting opinions or advice on *how* you're writing it, however, is productive. When you start trying to get consensus as to your plot, theme, story arc, etc...the same type of stories start appearing over and over. Like songfic...ugh.

Your stories also involve a lot of research -- to the extent that you've got FAQs on your web site. Does the research come from the storyline or vice versa, and how do you do the research itself?

The novels that I wrote after Snapshot (Umbra, ELS and Ellipsis,) were all technically heavy in the military and police fields. I'd had a lot of background already in those areas, so the research I've performed *specifically* for those stories had a much more focused nature. I interviewed military people for Umbra and Ellipsis, and cops galore for ELS. My personal research library fills about four bookcases in my home office, and the only reason it's not bigger is we have a serious space problem right now. Generally, the storylines come from my non-fiction reading. The story of how ELS was written is perhaps one of my favorite "story genesis" stories

I was living in Tucson, AZ at the time, and my girlfriend and I had gone to Borders to hang out and browse. I came across a book called "The Bible Code" and read the first six chapters sitting on one of Border's couches. I was so blown away by the idea, and I said to my girlfriend, "This would make a *great* X-Files novel!" She wasn't a real "fan" of the show, and didn't really "get" fanfic, so she kind of rolled her eyes. I was in the middle-towards- the-end of Umbra at that time, and the idea for ELS just wouldn't leave me alone.

I almost wrote ELS as a longish short story, because at the time time I'd been wanting to write a full-length serial killer XF novel. When I realized that I could use the ELS idea for the serial killer novel, the book jumped into my head almost fully-formed at that instant. The only thing that changed between the original concept and the finished product were the six or seven early chapters dealing with the Portland and Seattle cases and the minor porn subplot. And the ending. <G>

So I guess you could say that in the case of ELS, the research wrote the book.

How did you learn to create real, human characters? There are some notable original characters in your fanfiction, do you have any thoughts on how to balance original characters with Mulder and Scully?

Creating real human characters is a hard thing to teach someone to do; it's easy to observe and incredibly hard to describe. :) Basically, whenever someone asks me "how" to write, I tell them: Read. Read as much as you can. If you plan on writing in a specific genre, then read as much as you can. Take the stories that affect you and dissect them. What, if anything, made you really enjoy that story? I tend to like characters, so the material that I singled out ended up being heavy on characterization. And then, my second piece of advice is: Write. Write as much as you can. Continuously. And then rewrite. Again and again and again. Just keep at it, and eventually, you'll see improvement. You'll find yourself doing things unconsciously that help your writing.

When I started "casting" people in my novels, I got a lot of positive feedback from that. I think all authors, to a degree, "cast" characters in their heads. For me, casting allowed me to zero in on characteristics that I wanted to emphasize. I'd ask myself why I "saw" Helen Hunt as Deputy Inspector Alex Cahill, why I saw Garth Brooks as Daryl Hicks and so forth. For me, it's a shortcut, and I think it works.

Balancing the characters between M&S and original creations is really discipline, and loving your characters, and trusting your voice enough to let them speak. For the fanfic author, who is borrowing his or her main two characters from an established backstory/canon, there is little heavy lifting. When you create original chracters that are truly, utterly original, that's when the creative juices really get flowing. That's when the art of writing really reveals itself. When the author learns to trust his chararacters, that's when the blance shifts away from a story with zero outside characters to novels that have entire chapters without Mulder and Scully appearing in them.

How do you feel about posting works in progress? And once you've begun a story as a work in progress, does the storyline change once you've begun writing?

WIP is something I see-saw on. Every novel I've written has been a WIP when it was posted. I dislike authors that hold subsequent chapters hostage for feedback, and I think that dislike comes from an inner knowledge that one of the reasons WIP is so popular is that you can get feedback during the writing process and if someone complains about a certain plot direction, if you've written well (or loosely) enough, you can redirect it. That sounds like perverting your original artistic intent, and to some extent that's true. And to be honest, once the feedback started rolling in, it was nice. Taking a four-month vacation from 40-50 emails a day was something I didn't want to face, because at that time in my life my "fan mail" was pretty much the *only* positive feedback I was getting in my life.

With me, storylines are utterly fluid. Umbra is a good example of that; there wasn't supposed to be an alien within twenty chapters of that novel, and in the end they showed up. About midway through writing that, I realized that Graves wasn't working for himself, and that someone else was pulling his strings. And when I realized it was CSM, the rest fell into place.

Good writing, I think, happens like that. The writer sits in front of the page, or the typewriter, or the screen, and the story tells itself through the writer's fingers. So it wasn't like I came up with the idea that CSM was pulling Grave's strings. He just...was. And I wrote that down. That's the ethereal part of writing that's incredibly hard to describe, or teach. When someone who loves to write finds themselves in that magical groove, where the story is just flowing off their fingers, almost faster than they can type...you know you're onto something. Snapshot was a pain in the ass to write, Umbra was a breeze, and ELS, aside from the mental difficulties...the actual process of typing it out...was a vacation. That novel all but wrote itself.

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