Meet Jane! Known as la-muerta, she is a 35-year-old writer and fandom member from Singapore.
What is your favorite thing you have written?
Oh, this is hard. With the longer fics especially, I try to challenge myself to do at least one thing that I’ve never done before with every fic I write, so they’ve all got a special place in my heart.
I guess if I had to pick, then ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ is one that stands out for me. I was inspired to write it after I read an interview with Ernest Hemingway, in which he said, ‘Anybody can write an exciting story and make it interesting. The trick is to learn how to write a quiet story and make it interesting.’ Of all the long-ish fics that I have written, ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ is probably the only one with nary a gun or blade in sight. It’s set in Osaka, Japan, and is just about Magnus and Alec coming to terms with the sort of limbo they’ve found themselves in, and I think I managed to convey the wabi-sabi aesthetic/philosophy which I’m partial to – that nothing is perfect, nothing lasts forever, and nothing is ever truly ‘finished’ because we are constantly growing and changing, and that there is beauty in that.
What was the one thing that inspired you to write fic?
I’ve always been a lurker in the fandoms I’ve been in, just hanging out in the periphery. I haven’t really written fanfic before Shadowhunters, although I certainly read a lot of it. What makes Shadowhunters the exception? Malec.
Perhaps it’s partly the fact that it’s the first canon queer ship I’ve had, and partly that Harry and Matt have incredible chemistry and the care that they take in portraying their characters really comes through, or even that for once one half of the ship is Asian, and good rep is hard to come by. I cannot tell you exactly what makes their relationship so incandescent to me, only that I have never loved a ship as much as I love Malec, and I guess that makes me want to create lots of universes for their love story to play out.
You have an excellent Shadowhunters AU fic set in the Supernatural universe. If there is one thing you could take from the Supernatural universe and inject it into the Shadowhunters universe, what would it be?
If you think about it, Shadowhunters and Supernatural both play around with elements from Judeo-Christian mythology, which is why a Supernatural-verse fic made so much sense to me. Both shows also explore the theme of found families, especially in the case of Magnus (with Raphael, Simon, Ragnor, and Catarina, and to some extent Clary) and Jace (who may be Herondale by birth, but let’s face it, he’s a Lightwood). But I don’t really think there’s much I’d change about either shows, which I love for different reasons – although I’d certainly like to see a bit more diversity on Supernatural!
If you could write any couple you have never written about, who would it be?
Raphael/Izzy. I enjoyed the chemistry between David and Emeraude, but the way that the show dealt with their storyline soured that ship for me a little. I had Raphael/Simon/Izzy as a side pairing in one of my AU fics (developing attraction), but perhaps some day I’d like to explore Raphael/Izzy, but also in an AU setting (i.e., without all the baggage from show canon). Their dynamic interests me because Izzy is so confident in her sex appeal and comfortable with sex, whereas Raphael, being asexual, is not interested in all of that and I think it throws Izzy off completely. I’d like to explore how they navigate that and develop that initial spark into a meaningful relationship, but not being asexual myself, I want to be very careful with how I handle that. So I guess you can say I’m still researching until I feel comfortable enough to write it.
What is your favorite fic to read more than once?
I generally do not re-read fic. So many wonderful new fics out there, so little time! (My Marked For Later list is appalling.) And I have very few squicks, so honestly, I’ll read almost anything if it’s written well. My favorite type of fics are those that surprise me, have good plot, creative narrative structure, and use words efficiently and elegantly. Off the top of my head, here are a few fics I’ve read recently that I really enjoyed:
- ‘Far From Gone’ by Agnes Joseph
- ‘Everything Was Fine Until Whatever’ by Fatale
- ‘Nobody No Body Nobody’ by firstaudrina
- ‘Best of It’ by flying_pupitre
If someone learned something from reading any one of your stories, what would you hope they learned?
I don’t think my fics have a lesson to impart, or at least I don’t set out to write fic that does that. Mostly I just hope people have fun reading my fics and forget their worries for a while, but if there are any overarching themes in my fics, it’s that life can be messy and imperfect and things will not go the way you planned, but that isn’t always a bad thing. And along the way, maybe my readers can also learn an odd piece of trivia or two, such as, what the hell is a toyol? And what a bathhouse in an American frontier town in the 1880s would have been like [laughs].
What is it about Malec that inspires you the most?
That they fight for each other and their relationship. Falling in love is easy, but staying in love is the real challenge. It’s hard enough in real life, but when you’re the High Warlock of Brooklyn and Head of the New York Institute, and the choices you have to make affect not just you but the people you’re responsible for, making the conscious choice to stay together despite their differences, especially when often it’s not the easiest choice, shows just how committed they are to each other. I always love it when they deal a smackdown on anybody who dares to talk shit about their relationship.
When you sit down to write a new story, do you plan it all out in advance, with an ending in mind? Or do you go with the flow and let the story lead you?
It really depends on the type of story. I usually start every fic by writing the beginning and ending scenes first, and usually, I settle on the title and summary pretty early on as well. For fluff fics, I can usually just start writing with minimal planning. Long fics, on the other hand, definitely need proper plotting, especially since I usually have a lot of plot twists and the seeds of those need to be planted properly. That being said, as I write, I may find that the story wants to approach the plot milestone from a slightly different direction, and going with the flow almost always works better than sticking to what I initially planned.
As a writer, do you have a special trick for balancing integrity and details of the original characters with your own plot?
I write almost exclusively AUs because, for me, the fun part of writing fanfic is being free to experiment and putting the characters we know and love in vastly different situations and environments. To do that convincingly, I think you have to understand the basic personalities of the characters, but also how having a different set of experiences changes how they react in situations. For example, Magnus without 400+ years worth of tragic backstory probably won’t be the font of wisdom he is in canon, but I think there are basic aspects of his personality that don’t change, for example, that he has a big heart, but he’ll pretend he doesn’t care and hide behind a flippant facade. I don’t think there’s a short-cut or special trick to it – you just have to sit down and spend some time thinking about it.
But after I’ve settled on a characterization for that particular setting, I do have a trick for getting into the correct headspace quickly, which is music. For example, for my Supernatural-verse fic ‘Monsters’ my song for Alec was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Simple Man’ and my songs for Magnus were Led Zeppelin’s ‘In My Time of Dying’ and AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black.’
List your social medias and websites so fans can find you.
Archive of our Own: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_muerta/pseuds/la_muerta
Tumblr: https://la-muerta.tumblr.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tethysea
