A shared passion for Fringe created a quantum-entangled friendship for two women who might never have met otherwise – OConnellAboo, a broadcast traffic coordinator from New York City, and Dixie, a computer security analyst from Nashville, TN. They encouraged each other to start writing Fringe fic at the end of S3; despite the show ending a couple of years ago, they still talk writing, travel, politics, life - almost every day, and both credit Fringe as being the catalyst for their life-long bond.
How
did you start writing Fringe fic?
Dixie: OC and I were both part of the now-defunct Television Without Pity
forums. We seemed to have similar
opinions, liked a lot of the same fics, had the same snarky sense of humor, so
we sort of talked each other into writing something. I had never written fic, but she had – we
knew we both wanted to write Fringe fic, but were hesitant to take the next
step. I trusted her to give me her
honest opinion about what I wrote, she did the same, and that’s how we became each
other’s Betas.
My first story was a “6B”-inspired
fic. Like everyone else, I watched that
episode a thousand times and the idea that sprang from it just wouldn’t leave
me alone. It kept me awake at night,
like a movie playing in my head.
Finally, I wrote it down and sent it to OC. That was "You Belong
With Me".
OConnellAboo:
I had written some fan fiction before for X-Files
(dating myself here!), as well as a screenplay for a Final Draft competition a
bunch of years back. After Dix and I hit
it off online, we decided to be each other’s cheering squad/nudge/beta. My first story was “I Still Dream Of Organon” a fill-in-the-blank for “LSD” in S3.
The scene of Walter trying to bring Peter down from his acid trip really
touched me; it showed Walter in such a lovely paternal mode, despite the
bizarre circumstances. So, I wanted to
continue it a bit more. The title comes
from a Kate Bush song, “Cloudbursting,” about a child’s relationship with her
father, and it always reminds me of Walter and Peter.
Where
do you get your inspiration?
Dixie: Fringe is a paradise for fic writers – there are so many events or
incidents that are loosely explained or not explained at all, so many story
lines with opportunities to ‘fill in the blanks’. I like working within or close to canon, so a
lot of my stories are imagined as ‘missing scenes’, such as “Consequences Both Obvious and Unforeseen” from “The Firefly”
in S3, or “I Believe You Call It 'Love'”, set between “The Human Kind” and “Black
Blotter” in S5.
The relationships in Fringe are fertile
ground for writers, too. There was
always something that could be explained, analyzed, or more fully
addressed. Being a network show, there
were ALWAYS things that didn’t get full closure in the episodes – like Peter’s
obsession with the shape-shifters in S3. Did anyone REALLY think Olivia would just let that go? I didn’t, and “Full Disclosure” sprang out of
that. “Brookline” expanded on the scenes
near the end of S4, when Peter and Olivia were looking for a house, and looks
at how Peter reacts to becoming a father.
Fringe had great teasers, thanks to Bart
Montgomery and Ari Margolis. We used to
go NUTS, especially when the new season teasers were released, because we
didn’t know what was about to happen. The S5 teasers inspired me to write a series of stories set in 2036,
which were seriously jossed as the season progressed… but it was fun to do a
little world-building within the framework we saw early on. Those were “Shine”, “So Many Things to Say”, “Just As He Always Did”, and “Out of the Amber.”
OConnellAboo: As Dix said, Fringe is just a total playground
of the imagination for a writer – sometimes because it’s so frustrating! As my list of stories indicates, I get most
of my inspiration from the relationship between Walter and Peter; to me,
they’re the great love story of the series, and that story wasn’t explored
nearly enough for my liking.
This is going to sound weird, but I’ll
also, on occasion, come up with a title, and think of a Fringe situation to
match it later. I was watching a
production of Hamlet, and thought a phrase Hamlet used to describe his father
would make a great story title. I
thought for a bit, and decided that Peter’s impending fatherhood – and his
relationship with S4 Walter – would be a great match, and my story, “Hyperion to a Satyr”, was born.
How
do the two of you work together?
Dixie: The beta part is easy now; OC is a great writer to start with, so
there was seldom anything grammatically incorrect for me to worry about. The fun thing about working with the same
person is that you learn each other’s style. We kick around ideas as we start to write something new, and I rely on
her to keep me honest with tricky plot / time lines.
One of my favorite stories is one we wrote
together. We both had thought that
“Everything In Its Place” had a lot of possibilities for a backstory – it’s the
episode where Walter wants to take Gene out of the lab on a ‘field’ trip – and
we came up with “Grazing Day”. OC is a
master at writing the Peter / Walter relationship, and I love to write POlivia,
so it was a good fit. We each wrote
sections, then collaborated heavily on the transitions between scenes.
OConnellAboo: We work together
so well; while our styles differ somewhat, the spirit of our writing is very
similar. We like to get to the heart of
a situation – Why is someone acting the way they are? What’s the emotional fall-out? That’s the kind of stuff we really enjoy, so
it’s great fun to beta. And Dix has such
a great command of language and nuance, it’s hardly any work at all to be her
beta. Everybody should have a “job”
that’s this much fun.
How
long does it take to write one of your stories?
Dixie: Most of my one-shots took a
couple of days, maybe a week if I needed to research details or polish the
dialogue. The multi-chapter pieces could
take a month to six weeks, although the two stories I’m working on right now
have been ‘works in progress’ for over a year. I try to have a piece completed before I publish, although again, the
two stories I have up now are incomplete – I have a general idea of where I’m
going, but nothing is set in stone yet.
OConnellAboo: It varies for me
– the 25-ish chapters of “Matters of Great Import” stretched out over about
eight months. I usually have an
end-game in mind – I know pretty much how my stories will play out – but
sometimes the detours are the most fun.
The amount of time I’ve spent writing
one-shots varies; I literally wrote my story, “Snub”, in a half-hour fit of
pique when John Noble had yet again been overlooked in the Emmy
nominations. I think that might be the
fastest I’ve ever written, but my one-shots usually take me from a couple of
hours to a day or so to write, depending on word count and the amount of
research I need to do to keep my universes straight.
Favorites?
Dixie: There are lots of great
writers in the Fringe fandom, but OC is my personal favorite. “No Nay Never No More / Horseman, Pass By”
are a pair of one-shots set in S5 that I love – AU, but could easily be canon,
and the two never fail to make me cry. “Cut Him Out In Little Stars” won a Fringenuity contest for love
stories, and it’s another beautiful short story. “Matters of Perception” and “Matters of Great Import” are enthralling multi-chapter fics that are beautiful portrayals of the
Peter/Walter relationship, loosely based around S4.
Out of the stories I’ve written, I think
“Thirty Days” is my favorite. It’s a
multi-chapter fic that picks up the story with the final scene in 5.13. Joel Wyman talked about the feeling he wanted
to leave fans with after the finale – "I would want to sit in my car the day after the final episode and
think, ‘I know it's over, but I can kind of imagine where everybody is. I can
still feel these people I loved. They're not gone.’“ “Thirty Days” was my way
of doing that, and of saying goodbye to the series.
OConnellAboo: So many favorites
– almost all of them written by Dix. I
love “You Belong With Me”, and “Thirty Days”, but one of my favorites is a
one-shot she wrote called “Full Disclosure”. It really explores Peter’s feelings about the Machine, and addresses the
story thread from “Reciprocity” that the writers mysteriously dropped. I also enjoyed a story by Corwin of Amber
called “Hollenhund”, which is about how Walter’s father, Robert Bischoff, came
to America. It’s twisty, history-bending
fun.
Of my stories, I supposed I’m proudest of my two
multi-chapter monsters, “Matters of Perception”, and “Matters of Great Import”, because I wasn’t just filling in gaps; I took the Fringe universe somewhere it
hadn’t been, for better or worse, and wove an entire tale of my own. For sheer fun, I loved writing “Grazing Day”, with Dix. It was like an online Vulcan
mind-meld, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. We played to each other’s
strengths, kept each other’s timelines in check, and just had an absolute blast
doing it. It’s a wonderful thing to
have a collaborator you totally, 100% trust.
