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Elf Sternberginterviewed by Antheros
Antheros: I think you are the a.s.s. writer that has been online for the longest, and AFAIK you never announced your retirement and came back. Has writing--and writing for a.s.s--always been a pleasure to you? Or have you thought about stopping once or twice? There is a large gap between 1994 and 2000 when you barely touched the Journal Entries". Elf Sternberg: Many of the writers I know think about stopping now and then, but few actually go through with it. Writing is something I do because I wouldn't know what else to do with myself. These days I do find I'm trying to use my experience as a writer to craft something more than just a cheap smut story. The big gap from 1994 through 2000 is mostly due to my having gone through a very ugly breakup with a former girlfriend. When things like that involve children and custody battles, writing smut is definitely not what comes to the fore. And despite all that, I did manage to write a few; I think in every year of the gap I posted at least one story. A: Tell us a little about when you started in the usenet. In one of your posts you mentioned that it had to do with thinking that you could write better stories than some you were reading. ES: Oh, yeah, that was a long time ago. In truth, I'd been writing stories for my own amusement for many years. There was a day in late 1989 when I read a story on alt.sex called "A Very Brady Sex Story." It was terrible-- poorly formatted, misspelled, grammatically painful. Worse yet, it was a series of scenes with no explanation, no lead-in, no justification for why the characters were the way they were depicted. I suppose if I'd been familiar with the Brady milieu I might have gotten more of the jokes, but as it was I had no idea why Marcia doing the dog might have had humor value. So I pulled out an older story in my collection, "The Kittenin'," and polished it a little, and posted it. I got feedback, so I wrote a sequel. And another. And things just kinda got out of hand from there. A: Had you written erotic stories before? I think your work, if it had to be labelled, would be more fantasy than erotica, wouldn't it? ES: Actually, I had not, come to think of it. It was certainly something I liked reading. I sometimes joke that what I really write is soap opera, but unlike the writers of General Hospital I'm more comfortable imagining passion on the intense deck of a starship than I am in frivolous banter at some nurse's station. Then again, starships have med bays and I've written more than one scene in such a setting. I took the two things I understood the best in literature, SF and erotica, and just started writing. Like any writer who has a volume of work behind him, the basic tenet is just that: write something. The Aimee series broke out as a place to write "politically incorrect" smut. No matter what happens in The Journal Entries, the setting with its angelnetting AIs prevents real damage from happening to the characters. It's writing around those limitations that I find fascinating these days. Fortunately, no amount of local omniscience on the part of the AIs can prevent a broken heart. A: "Usenet was better before" is a phrase probably first typed ten days after Usenet was created, and has been repeated ever since. You've read the a.s.s. groups for over 15 years; what can you tell us about its evolution? ES: I'm not one of those people who believe now that Usenet was better then. I did a lot of hand-wringing in the late 1990's and suffered a bout of dismay over the AOLization of Usenet, but I've decided not to dwell on it. The Internet has evolved, and we must simply evolve with it or disappear into the past. The volume has dropped a lot as other venues take over, but the quality has gone up so spectacularly that I think, over all, there's a net gain. (Or maybe I've just become very good with my killfiles, another feature of Usenet that other forums haven't quite mastered or implemented adequately.) Part of the reason for the quality gain, I suspect, is the mainstreaming of erotica; sex scenes are now a staple of romance writing, there's now "romantica," and even outright smut is sold on the shelves of Barnes & Noble or Borders. All writers, even the most crass beginner, tries to emulate the stuff she admires, and there's a lot of excellent, high-quality erotica on the shelves now. ASSD, on the other hand, seem to go through cycles of utility and frivolity. During the utility phases, there's a lot of good discussion on plot, characterization, and pacing, more so than on some of the rec.arts.writing and rec.arts.composition newsgroups. Right now it's a bit frivolous. A: But don't you think that most of the online stories differ in essence to what is usually printed? I don't mean erotica in particular. I often find online stories lacking a few features that I find precious: attention to details and descriptions, a deeper meaning, and all that. In fact, it's almost impossible to find good stories online outside of the erotica genre--take a look at the usenet, there's no pure alt.stories group. Besides the "anonymity" of writing and reader, do you see any other differences? ES: I think it depends on where you go and what you read. I've been buying and reading the stuff from Ellora's Cave, which is where you go when you've graduated from storiesonline.com, I suspect. And the stuff there is much worse than anything you'll find from, say, Shalon Wood or Jack Lipton. I think there are online writers who try; finding them is difficult. A: From what I gathered, you've been writing for years before you first posted. Did you write only for yourself? Did you entertain thoughts of getting it published someday, did you let other people read it? ES: I wrote a lot of very bad Mary Sue in high school and through university. I don't think I ever thought of getting published, and I didn't let anyone actually read it until I decided to post to alt.sex way back when. It was just an outlet and an escape. A: Is it still [an outlet and an escape]? Or have the reasons why you write changed with time? Well, I have fans now. :-) So I try not to disappoint them, and sometimes I get requests. But yeah, it's still an escape, it's still something other than my professional life that I'd rather do. I guess if I had to make money at it, it wouldn't be so much fun. A: The "Journal Entries" is a gigantic work. How do you keep track of all that is going on, the characters, the subplots? Does the story ends up writing itself? Photo (c) Copyright 2006 John Nemeth. All Rights Reserved. ES: I take the Robert E Howard (of Conan fame) approach: I try to write individual stories and keep track of as little as possible. I do have a Wiki where I keep track of the planets and starships I've created and some important dates and significant events, but after that my premise is to pick a situation I want to write about and find the appropriate characters, often by re-reading older stories. If I don't have them already, I have to craft new characters. The series has evolved into a "mythos plus" series: there's a core thread around Shardik, P'nyssa, and Aaden, and then there are other series that revolve around other people who have to live in the universe Shardik has created. When I'm stuck for something to write about, which isn't often these days, I just pick and character and ask myself, "What can toss his way that would make his life better or worse?" A: You're open about your identity. Has it been this way from the beginning? Why? ES: Well... I started out young and stupid. These days Google won't let you escape from your past, so I've decided to just live with it. It hasn't actually hurt all that much; I've been very careful in real life to keep my professional life, my family life, and my, uh, social life separated, in a consistent way. A: This leads us to another issue, one which has been touched in previous interviews: privacy, censorship, etc. These subjects were mentioned in last issue's interviews with Eli the Bearded and Lazeez Jiddan. Could you tell us a bit about how active you are or were in this field? A: Did the attempts of internet censorship affect you? ES: Not in a legalistic sense, no. The government hasn't come after me yet. My first ISP was bought out by a larger company which then politely asked me to leave, and I did. I don't count that as censorship; it was their platform and if they didn't want my money, that was fine; there were other ISPs that would gladly take it. These days I just buy the metal and run my own web server. I keep intending to update the look and feel of the thing, but working on websites is what I do in real life, and it's starting to feel like "work" to work on the HTML side of the business. A: Would you mind talking a little about "The only fair game" and Larry Niven? ES: After the thread on Slashdot, I'm not sure that there's anything left to say. I wrote it because I thought it was obvious. Human beings are just weird, and they have weird sexual expressions that, despite ruthless suppression by the cultural powers-that-be, in any culture, at any time, continue to show up. I think that's a natural consequence of us being succesful conscious replicators: the vastness of our expression is a necessity of the vastness of experiences we may encounter at any time and place. That vastness allows us to live anywhere on the Earth. The Kzin characters are also successful conscious replicators that have overrun their own world, so for them to be less diverse than we are is somewhat perverse. What Niven gave us also radiated with the overblown, pent-up testosterone of many a leatherqueen. Niven himself approved the notion of the "years of perversion," periods between the Man-Kzin wars during which Kzin priests would actually wear the skinned faces of humans in the hopes of fooling "the human's gods" to come to their side. With all that tossed together, the idea of gay Kzin made a lot of sense to me, and I wanted to point out how amiss it was to ignore that aspect of their characterization. It should be obvious that I really like Larry Niven's work. I wasn't all that fond of the Kzin themselves; there were other stories in his career that I remember with greater pleasure than any of the Kzin stuff. I think any writer who's going to do parody or any kind of fanfiction has to love the writing he's parodying, or he's just not going to do it well. It has to be the sort of work one has read and re-read and taken notes, because it is the tone, the setting, and the little touches of vocabulary that really matter in parody. Maybe that's a reason I was so annoyed at the "Brady Bunch" parody: it lacked conviction. Photo (c) Copyright 2006 John Nemeth. All Rights Reserved. A: You're a programmer. Are programming and writing related at all, in your conception? ES: Other than involving long hours in front of the keyboard, not really. I have to actively sit down and set my mood and thought patterns differently to write code than I do to write stories. Both can, at times, become all-encompassing and provide flow, but that's more a matter of them both being mind work. A: How did you end up maintaining the alt.sex FAQ? Are you still actively maintaining it? ES: Wayne just said he was tired of it. I took it over. I'm not actively maintaining it (in fact it's hosted elsewhere these days), and much of what's in it is sadly out-of-date. There are so many other useful resources out there, like scarleteen.com and The Guide To Getting It On! (I have no affiliation with either), that its antiquity might even be considered hazardous. A: You've got a blog. What led you to write it? Don't you feel odd writing a journal of what happens in your life, to be read by anybody? ES: The very meaning of the word "journalist" is "one who keeps a journal for public consumption." Journalism started out as either travelogue or commentary, sent as letters to newspapers and containing "I did this," and "I saw that." Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad is done mostly in that tradition, for example. I suppose I'm more prolific on my blog than a lot of my friends, but then I just have a lot to say. What I can put into my stories, I do. And what I can't, I just blog. It all goes back to that "have to write" bug. (c) Copyright 2006 by Antheros and Elf Sternberg. All Rights Reserved |
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The Journal of Desire | Volume 3, Number 2 |