How and when did you get started writing fan fiction and why the pen name Gersemi?

I started writing fanfiction way back when, I think I was about 12 or 13, so that was a good ten years ago. I had been writing short original pieces on and off before that, but I didn’t discover fanfiction until then. The first piece I ever wrote was a sort of crossover between Anne Rice’s ‘Vampire Chronicles’ and a horrible Mary-Sue inspired by Michael Turner’s ‘Witchblade’ (yeah, I know – don’t ask). I never published it, though, mostly because it was left unfinished, it was completely in German, and well, let’s face it, it was really awful. It was followed by a not-so-short Stargate thing, that wasn’t much better, so it never saw the light of day either. A short while later, I got into the Buffy fandom, and I started writing for it in English, and I found that I can write more creatively in English than in my native German. At that time, most of my stories were smut. For a couple of years, Buffy was really the only fandom I was really involved with.

I have also written quite a number of Harry Potter fics, mostly Snape-centred Mary-Sue stuff. A short time later, I discovered X-Men. :)

Gersemi is the name of the LARP character I have been playing since 2002. Since then, Gersemi has been my screen name in most of the forums etc. that I frequent. The character was named after the Nordic goddess of beauty; the name means ‘precious’ or ‘jewel’.

Why did you start writing in this fandom? what was the appeal of the films and the Logan/Rogue characters?

I have been reading comics since forever, and have always been a semi-fan of the X-Men comics even though I didn’t seriously follow them. Most of the screen versions of popular comic books I’d seen were truly awful, but the reviews I read for X-Men were really good, and so I decided to give it a shot. And well, it was the best screen adaptation I had seen so far. Shortly after, I wrote a short Logan/Rogue story, but it was never finished. Mostly written to see if the shoe fit, and back then it didn’t.

I think the relationship between Logan and Rogue, as it was shown in X1, held so much potential, much more than any of the others. I never bought into the Logan/Jean thing as it was portrayed there. Besides, I have a thing for older men, and being only 16 myself when X1 came out, I could totally relate to why Rogue felt attracted to Logan. Plus, they’re such incredibly troubled people, and yet (or because of that?) they instantly had this connection.

After watching X2 a few times too many, the ship really hit me, but I didn’t start writing until early in 2006 while waiting for X3, and didn’t publish until after X3 came out. The first thing I seriously wrote for L/R was “Guise Will Be Guise”, which came out as the first part of the Façades series. After X2, the possibilities for Logan and Rogue were endless, and I wanted to have my fair share of exploring those possibilities.

You’ve stated though, in regard to some of your stories, you’ve ignored certain canonical events in the movies, or even an entire movie in some cases. Why? What’s your attraction with AUs?

As much as I love the movies, in respect to the relationship between Logan and Rogue I find X3 sorely lacking. So while I may take a lot of inspiration from the movies, I like to bend a few facts, shape them to my liking. And while X3 offered a very beautiful L/R scene, I feel that they didn’t really get into the why’s and how’s of Rogue’s decision. On top of that, I started delving into the Comicverse, so a lot of my inspiration (mainly about Rogue’s character) comes from there, and so my stories more often than not can not be put into the Movieverse category.

AUs offer tons of possibilities. You can put the characters, with all their quirks and faults, into a completely different scenario, but the attraction still works. They still work. Some of the best X-Men (not only L/R) fanfiction I have read has been AU.

In your opinion, what are the limitations with AU? Is there a point beyond which you are no longer writing about the characters or universe the readers are fans of?

There most definitely is such a point. Any story that doesn’t take place in one of the various X-Men universes is hard to pull off, mainly because you now have to write them without what makes them *them* - without their powers. An 18th century Marie may still have many things in common with Movie!Rogue or Comic!Rogue, but the thing that defines Rogue’s character is her mutation. Take that away, and you have an average Southerner, so I think it takes a great author to pull off such a radically different AU.

Which of your stories was the most difficult to write, the most fun, and why?

I think the most difficult would have to be ‘Not A Fool’. I knew I wanted them to have (emotionally) painful sex, but getting them to that point prove to be a lot more difficult than I had thought.

The most fun was probably ‘All Laid Bare’. For one, it was delightfully short, and the image I had in my head just made me grin like a madwoman while I was writing it.

You have a couple of stories, ‘Teacher’s Pet’ and ‘Picket Fences’, that are works-in-progress. Do you usually work on more than one story at a time? If so, how do you keep them straight in your head?

Right now, I have 10 WIPs lying about, not counting those still in the first planning stage. As there are pronounced differences between the stories, it’s really rather easy to keep them separate. But sometimes I’ll have to abandon a story that has 10 pages already because I come to a dead end. That’s probably the downside to not writing with a plan.

Are you influenced by your readers as to which ones to update?

Not really, no. Sometimes, if I receive some really excellent feedback, it’ll spark a new idea, which will lead to an update. But that’s rare.

Are the individual chapters just breaks in writing sections/sessions after which you want to post what you have done, or is there more planning involved?

That differs, really. In a few cases, the chapters simply show separate events in a story (like in ‘Teacher’s Pet’, for example), other times it’s really just the “Gotta post something” that sweeps me away. But that doesn’t happen too often.

Angst vs. humour vs. shipper. You’ve written them all. Do you have a favourite type of story to write?

I like writing humour, but for me it’s the hardest to pull off. Being funny is hard work. So I’d have to say I prefer writing angst, mainly because Logan and Rogue are such troubled characters, which makes writing them angsty rather easy.

Do you have a plan when you’re writing? Explain the process that you go through.

Generally, no. I have a lot of respect for those authors who think a story through from the first to the last sentence, but I mostly make things up as I go along. Most of my stories are inspired by every-day events – crossing a red light, taking out the trash, those things. Many start off with just a single sentence that springs to life in my head, and I go from there; sometimes they’ll fit into an existing story, other times they are the starting point of an entirely new story. But more often than not, I don’t have a clue where the story is really going to go.

Has a story ever gone off in a different direction than you planned? For example?

Oh yes. ‘Point of no Return’ started out as a completely innocent story about two friends having a couple of drinks, and then it turned into a full-blown (no pun intended) PWP thing. ‘Feelin’ You’ also wasn’t supposed to have smut in it, I didn’t plan for it to continue until after they left the bar. But as I don’t really plan my stories from A to Z, I’m seldom genuinely surprised by the outcome.

‘Domestic Life’ was inspired by events in your own life. Can you tell us a bit about the story and how it came about?

When I was pregnant with my son in 04/05, my husband and I agreed very early on that the hospital would be the last place we’d go to to have this baby. Unfortunately, the midwife we’d hired to come to our home birth had to back out due to a conference she had to attend, which left us without a midwife as she was the only one who did home births within 20 miles, and everything else was too far for our liking. So that left us with no other option than going to the hospital. I already knew about unassisted childbirth back then, but I didn’t feel comfortable having a go at it the first time, even though my husband suggested it more than once. My son’s birth was, by comparison, a walk in the park, other women’s dream birth, really - relatively intervention-free and over rather fast. I laboured at home for about 24 hours, then drove to the hospital, and he was born 1 ½ hours later, with no complications. We were home five hours after the birth.

However, this birth hadn’t been what I had wanted. From the second I set foot into the hospital, I felt like someone had taken the reigns from me and I didn’t have a say anymore. We had to fight about the epidural with the midwife, about not cutting the cord right away, and other such things. So a short while after the birth, I delved into UC more, researched, and decided I’d give it a shot the next time. And that is still my plan.

The more I researched UC, the less I could fight off the thought, ‘Hey, this could be just the thing for Logan and Rogue’. Logan with his hands-on approach to a lot of things, and Rogue’s desire to be as normal as possible gave the perfect starting point for a fic about UC. I also wanted to show a more mainstream audience that birth doesn’t have to happen at the hospital, that doctors don’t ‘deliver’ babies. Giving birth should be the greatest experience of our lives, and I know too many women who had that wonderful experience ruined by circumstances that could have been avoided, had they not bought into the idea that birth is this dangerous thing that has to be managed by professionals. So I guess I’ve become a little radical about that topic, and so it is to be expected that I’d “have” to write about it.

What were some of the other major sources of inspiration for various stories?

As I said before, many of my stories are inspired by the things I do, or things I hear or see. Sometimes a single sentence will spring up in my head, and I’ll build a story around it. For example, with ‘On The Inside’, this sentence was the starting point:

“But that other first time... When he had almost killed her, had stabbed her, had penetrated her.”

That’s what I had to work around. And that’s how a lot of my stories start out, really – just one sentence, or a short piece of dialogue, or sometimes even just a look.

Is there a particular X-character which you identify with or who you can relate to better?

Identify with, not really, no. I do, however, adore Rogue in all her incarnations (except maybe Evolution!Rogue), and I really like Nightcrawler.

It seems like music is involved in many/most of your stories in some way or another. Can you explain the role that music plays in your writing?

Music plays a very important role in my entire life. While I don’t actively play music, there is almost always music of some sort running at our house. A lot of my stories are inspired be the ‘feel’ of a song, or by the lyrics. I don’t put songs on repeat during writing, but I’ll have the lyrics on hand and will listen to the song from time to time.

If you had to make a playlist/soundtrack for Logan/Rogue, what songs would you include?

Oh boy. Well, definitely “It Doesn’t Matter” by Alison Krauss. It’s just perfect for the way they are in X1 and X2. “Smile” by Ghost of the Robot is also rather fitting, I think, and of course “Good Night Sweet Girl”. And, strangely enough, “Beautiful Stranger” by Madonna. Plus about a million others, but well.

‘Facades’ was written as a series with three separate stories. Why not write it as a single multi-chapter story like, ‘Picture Perfect’ or ‘Domestic Life’?

I feel that each of the three stories in Façades could stand on its own, so it didn’t feel right to just divide make them into chapters, which is why it came out as a series. The chapters in ‘Picture Perfect’ or ‘Domestic Life’ make no sense on their own.

What’s the difference between a series and long multiple chapter story?

As I said above, you could read ‘Through The Looking Glass’ and leave out the other parts of the series, and it would still make sense. A series consists of various stories, so to speak.

You wrote ‘Hold Me’ as an alternate (second) ending to the ‘Facades’ series. Can you tell us why you felt this necessary? i.e. changed your mind? Couldn’t make up your mind? Reader feedback?

Personally, I like ‘TTLG’ better than ‘Hold Me’, but a couple of readers were unhappy with Rogue ending up with Scott, and when someone promises me a chocolate-covered Logan if I write an alternate ending, who am I to say no to that? ;)

What's your favourite Logan/Rogue moment from one of your stories?

I really love the ending of ‘Point of no Return’, because it’s so simple. There is no awkwardness, no hard feelings. Just a deep understanding of each other.

Have you ever been in the middle of a story when the characters stopped co-operating? What do you do then... i.e. how do you deal with writer's block?

Oh yes, all the time. It happens frequently that a story goes into a different direction than I had intended, but some of those stories never get finished. Also, I have long periods of ‘draughts’ when writing. Sometimes I won’t be able to write for weeks, months even, and then I write ten, 15 pages in a couple of days. But it’s not something I can make happen.

‘Feelin’ You’ was the first time you had written smut in a while. What do you find easy and what do find difficult about writing smut?

Smut scenes appear in my head with very great detail, and I find it very difficult to translate all the little things that happen during sex into words: the little touches, the sounds people make, but also the general feel of a situation – good vs. bad, tense vs. relaxed. I can have the perfect smut scene in my head, but when I write it down, it lacks that certain something. But I find that the more I write, the easier it becomes.

When I started writing smut, it was often very crude, overly detailed. I concentrated too much on what was happening, not on what was going on, so to speak – too much of what was said, too little of the things that were left unsaid, and didn’t need to be said. I think I nailed that pretty well by now.

How do you decide upon a title for your stories?

Honestly? I have no idea. Some stories are named from the beginning but get a new title once they’re finished, others are untitled until the end. How I find the titles, I really couldn’t say. Sometimes I’ll read a line somewhere that’ll strike me as ‘possible story title’, and I file it away as that. But there’s really no recipe to it.

Do you always give titles to a story’s individual chapters as well? Why or why not?

Depends. Some stories (like ‘Domestic Life’) have chapter titles, others don’t. It really depends on my mood, there’s not general rule for it.

You've been writing fan fiction for a while. How do you think your writing has changed from your earlier stories?

I think I have become more sensitive for characterisation. In my early writing days, my characters were really out of character more than they were in. That’s the good thing about fanfiction, I guess, that you can make things happen. But the fanfiction masses are unforgiving, and so now I actively try to get the characters right. Also, my style of writing has evolved, mostly because when I started writing, I was still quite inept at English. My early stories are very simple, but my vocabulary grew and now I like to think that my writing is pretty good.

When you're not writing fan fic, what are you doing in Real Life--i.e. interests, hobbies, work, etc.?

I’m from Germany, I’m 23 years old, and I live in a middle-sized town near Cologne with my husband, our son, and our dog and three pet rats. I’m a work-at-home mum, I have a small online shop where I sell cloth diapers, baby carriers and the like. I’m also training to become a lactation consultant. My other hobbies include riding, sewing, reading, LARP, theatre, and music.