In regards to more fannish pursuits, I'm a second-generation science fiction fan, benefiting from my parents' collection of books and movies. Science fact interests me just as much, though. As a kid, I had a microscope and a chemistry set, not to mention access to the family's computers. We had a Radio Shack TRS 80 back in the early '80's. It had no internal memory and ran programs on cassette tapes that looked exactly like music cassettes, but I could do ASCII art and play games on it. Everything's so much easier now with my 50+ Gb computer.

I also enjoy all things related to medicine. I find the human body fascinating, both in how vulnerable and how resilient it can be. I never gave much thought to going into medicine as an occupation, though. Despite my interest on an intellectual level, in real life I'm a wimp when it comes to blood and suffering.

When I saw the X-Men movie on opening night, I had an immediate need to know more about the characters, especially Wolverine. Searching for X-Men books resulted in a lot of disappointment, though. I'd expected Marvel to make the most of the movie's hype and publish novels, but the movie's novelization was based on an old script and no new novels followed it. I did buy the Essential Wolverines and several comics covering the more interesting Wolverine stories, but fan fiction seemed to fit my interests the best.

I became a member of the xmenmoviefanfic and wolverineandrogue egroups almost immediately after they started. I discovered wolverineandjubilee.com, fanfiction.net and other, smaller fan fiction archives shortly thereafter. Despite the fact I'd joined these lists and become a regular visitor to several fan fiction sites, though, I lurked for months. Yep, I'm that shy even in cyberspace.

It took about four months before I ever delurked and wrote anything, and even then I only started a round robin on wolverineandjubilee.com. I didn't solo-author a story until three more months had passed. It took me that long to gain confidence in myself as a writer and to come up with a story idea that couldn't be satisfactorily written as a round robin.

The main reason I overcame my shyness and posted is that no one would write the story I wanted to read. I wanted to know what happened to Logan at Alkali Lake and what he found out about his past, the more action the better. The majority of the stories at the time focused on his return to the mansion and his relationship with Rogue, only mentioning Alkali Lake in passing.

That's the best thing about writing stories; the focus is on things that interest me, like action and medical drama, and off of things that don't, like soap-operaish love triangles. Also, because fandom builds on itself, my stories can affect other authors and influence the types of stories they write. It's a win-win situation.

I really love the power writing gives me to manipulate reader's emotions, too. It can be sadistic how much I love a good cliffhanger.

The writers on the wolverineandrogue egroup are the ones who convinced me of the relationship possibilities between the two. I don't think it was any particular story, just the conglomerate of amazing fan fics over the course of several months after the movie came out that converted me.

To me, Logan and Rogue are defined by their mutations. Logan is a man so abused because of his mutation that he doesn't trust people enough to let anyone close, and Rogue is a woman who, by the very nature of her mutation, can't let anyone close without hurting or killing them. They are two outsiders who have found love and acceptance in each other.

Usually, I'll get the cliffhanger for the first part, an interesting bit of dialogue, a disease or injury I wanna try out on Logan, and I'll start writing. That writing method has gotten me in trouble, though. If I don't know what's going to happen next, then I can't be sure I'll ever come up with anything and the story will stall. I find that my stories work best when I know how the next few parts will end, but not the ending for the entire story.

Rogue's something of a mystery to me. I tend to imbue her with personality traits I admire, or my own personality traits if I'm really desperate. I guess she can be kind of a Mary Sue at times.

I like to explore his psychology, but I also just like writing his thoughts and dialogue. He's a doctor, so I can use the more complex terminology I come across in my story research, along with all dem really big words they taught me at skool. ;-)

Of all the other X-Men, I think I'd most like to meet Scott. I'm interested in finding out how well he compares to Minisinoo's, Vic's, and jenn's movieverse Scotts. They all bring different aspects to his character, but overall, he's a likeable guy in each of their incarnations. I find Scott a difficult character to write, and meeting him might help me get a better idea of what he's all about.

First of all, as I mentioned above, I find medical science interesting and Logan is my favorite character. Why wouldn't I naturally want to put them together? Besides, the vast majority of comics featuring Logan involve him fighting and getting hurt in one way or another, but almost none of them show the real consequences of those injuries. They either speed up his healing factor to magical levels or skip forward to when he's mostly healed, thereby passing over what I consider to be the more interesting part of the story.

Second, I'm not a doctor no matter how much I play one with my writing. In the case of any other character, a knowledgeable reader might catch a mistake in my medical regimen where I'd actually killed the character that I thought I was saving. However, Logan's healing factor can compensate for my medical malpractice.

Third, because Logan is accustomed to having a healing ability, he never has to deal with the pain and frustration of a long-term illness or a serious injury. I find it interesting to push him out of his comfort zone and giving him the experience of a body that has betrayed him to see how he'll react.

Fourth, Logan's healing abilities will save his life, conquering illnesses and injuries that would fell any normal human being. Therefore, I can go further and injure him more extensively than any other character and still believably save his life at the end of the story.

Finally, I just love the adrenaline rush that a sudden, traumatic incident in a story can give me. I'm a junkie who needs my regular sufferin'!Wolvie fix.

There are several benefits to doing a little research before and/or while writing a story. It gives the story a more realistic feel, it can help me get a better idea of the amount of detail I want to include in a particular scene, and it can even give me new plot ideas to either include in the story or to use in a new story. Plus, the research I do now makes it easier for me to write fics in the future.

There are two reasons I limit the amount of details in my stories. One, I'm not a doctor, and I don't do nearly enough research to write intelligently about all the nitty gritty details. More importantly, though, my readers aren't medical professionals, nor are many of them interested in becoming ones. A glut of medical details would be boring to them and bring my story to a grinding halt.

Because my original characters are integral to the plot, I use their function in the story as a backbone for their characterization. Venom's characterization was based on her mutation. Anna's was based on her purpose to lighten an otherwise depressing situation. Elizabeth's was based on the need for an intelligent yet cunning woman that could pull off the plot twist.

When I pose challenges, I try to make them as free of rules as possible so more writers might be interested in responding. My focus is on getting writers working rather than on the story their work produces. Besides, I find it fascinating how many vastly different stories can come from the same general challenge.

There were two inspirations for "Remember Me." The first was a line from "X-Men: The Movie." Professor Xavier answers a question by saying, "I am psychic, you know." One day, I was lying on my couch, half-listening to "The Sixth Sense" while trying to recover from a cold when the professor's line came back to me, and I began to wonder if psychic!Xavier could "see dead people."

About a week later, Minisinoo and I sent some emails back and forth discussing a few sentences in the middle of her "Heyoka" series where the title character watches Logan interacting with Rogue and guesses that he might have a daughter around her age in his forgotten past. The idea intrigued me because it would explain Logan's almost immediate and desperate need to save Rogue in the movie. I don't have any children, but the moment my first nephew was born, I knew I'd do absolutely anything to keep him safe. I imagine that connection must be much stronger between parent and child.

I'd been trying to think of a ghost that the professor could see, and Logan's long lost daughter fit my needs perfectly. Once I had the two ideas connected, the story pretty much wrote itself.

You see, when writing a round robin story, no one should have an idea of how it's going to end until the story begins to wind down. If one or more of the writers have a direction they want the story to go, they'll most likely be disappointed. This lack of direction is helpful if the originator of the round robin doesn't have any idea where to take the story and hopes that other fans might. However, it can result in a rambling story that goes too long or remains a permanent work in process. Therefore, the person who starts a round robin is responsible for continuing to contribute throughout the course of the story not necessarily to control its direction, but to keep the plot moving and to point the story towards a conclusion when the time comes.

While writing round robins, I learned that the best way to keep other authors participating is to always end my part with a cliffhanger. It compels those people following the story to add simply to get some sort of resolution to whatever problem I'd left the characters confronting.

Despite the connection they made in the movie, Logan and Rogue only knew each other a week or so before he left again. Also, Rogue is very inexperienced when it comes to romantic relationships. Her first kiss occurred at the age of sixteen and ended very negatively. There is no indication that she had any serious relationships during the eight months she was on the road before she met Logan, and most of the stories to which I refer had her avoiding relationships with her peers in favor of Logan. Therefore, she was jumping from her first kiss into a sexual relationship with a veritable stranger.

Some of the stories argued that Rogue had been educated in adult relationships by the memories of the men she'd absorbed. However, memories fade, she'd never touched a woman, and the memories weren't colored by her own emotions and experiences. They could not let her know what a sexual relationship would be like for her or what it would mean to her.

Several of the stories also argued that despite the short amount of time Rogue had known Logan before he left, absorbing his memories had helped her to learn everything she needed to know. However, we judge ourselves by our intentions and judge others by their actions. Logan's memories would have been colored by rationalizations for his behavior. Therefore, Rogue couldn't know how he actually behaved or how he would act in a relationship with her.

When writing "Irreconcilable Differences," I took all of these concerns and created a worst-case scenario for Logan and Rogue. I hadn't planned on them to becoming physically violent with each other. It just kind of grew out of the story. I must admit, though, that I was very depressed that week and had to get these ideas written down and out of my head so I could work towards improving my mood. The story did bring many people down and contributed to the death of the WaR list, but I felt a lot better after it was done and out. It cheered me up.

During those months that I lurked online, one of the reasons I hesitated to write a story is that I felt most comfortable with Logan's character, but it seemed he could only be written with a constant stream of swear words emanating from his mouth and/or brain. Eventually, I came to the realization that he could be believably written with a minimum of swearing if I eliminated almost all extraneous descriptors and exclamations in the story where a swear word would normally be used. That way, when I did allow Logan to say "hell" or "damn," it'd have more punch.

In regards to smut, at least my characters now get a sentence or two to imply they have had or are going to have sex. In my earlier stories, you'd think the stork brought the babies for all the evidence you saw of the parents coupling, so I have loosened up a little. Still, I doubt I'll go any further in future stories.

That's not to say I find humor writing difficult. When I'm in the mood and have a plot idea, the story usually flows just as easily as my more dramatic fics. The effort comes in the creation of the idea.

I'm inspired by other writers' stories, by trends in fandom, or even by my own stories. I simply play the "what if?" game. For example, there was an online discussion concerning Logan's powers in relation to Rogue. Someone threw out the postulation, "What if Logan's healing ability was stronger than we suspect and he'll eventually become immune to Rogue's power?" Being the contrarian that I am, I wondered what would happen if Rogue's power was stronger than we suspect. "The Price of Love" was the result.

In regards to the specific stories you mentioned, I was quite depressed at the time I wrote "A Life Found and Lost." I wondered what would happen if Rogue was already lost no matter what Logan did to save her on the statue. I suppose I could have written it as an AU, but I love the challenge of taking the facts in the movie and putting different spins on them. Therefore, if Rogue was already dead when Logan touched her, someone had to be controlling her body during the dogtag scene. Logan would have revealed what had happened and Cody was too weak, so it had to be Magneto.

I don't think anything in particular inspired "Rebirth." I was just what-iffing one day about Logan's escape from Weapon X. Most people stick with the comic!canon established in the Weapon X trade paperback where Logan fought his way out, killing as he went. I wondered if there was another, less action-packed way he could have gotten his freedom, some way that ensured the program's creators wouldn't know he'd escaped. What better way than death?

The "Betrayal" series popped up when I was in the middle of writing "A Stolen Season." I'd paralyzed Logan at the beginning of that story, and he got better. It made me think about the professor's confinement to a wheelchair and what he might be willing to do to find a cure for himself.

That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the need for establishing a setting for my characters. I have made a concerted effort to add more description with each new story I write. This change has come about as I learn more about writing both in practicing it myself and in reading the works of others. There's nothing like the consistent practice of editing my own work and evaluating the work of others to learn more about writing well.

I have several stories in the works, but none that will be posted any time soon. Most of them are WIPs that were partially posted before my health problems arose last year. I am working on all of them, especially "Home Construction, Soul Repair" and the follow-up stories to "Tale of a Knife." I will not, however, be posting any of my work until the stories are completely finished. It's totally unfair to my readers to leave them at cliffhangers without resolutions for so long, and I won't compound my error by continuing to intermittently post portions of the stories.

I do participate in challenges and write 100-word drabbles, so those are more likely to be seen before any of the longer fics are done. Also, I began working on a comic!Logan story months ago that follows up on his death/resurrection in the Wolverine series and brings the plot threads to a more satisfying conclusion. However, that will take some time to complete as well.

At this time in my life, I'm focusing more on my physical and mental health than my fandom obligations, and I can only hope my readers understand.

There is no way that Marvel will ever pair Logan and Jean together in a long-term relationship. They've proved that in 30+ years of continuity. I have no fear that it will happen now in the movie.

Rogue has only been paired with Remy and Magneto/Joseph in the comics. Given that Remy isn't in X2 and Magneto tried to kill her in the first movie, I doubt she'll be hooking up with either of them. As for Bobby, I foresee a broken heart for him in the future. Marvel never lets him get the girl.

I won't be making changes to my previously written stories after X2 comes out. They'll all just become AUs off the original movie. Any new stories I write, though, will take off where X2 ended. Although I love to write cliffhangers, I can't bear them when someone else leaves loose ends. I have to resolve them to my satisfaction. I suspect that X2 will leave several things unresolved in anticipation of future movies, so I doubt I'll be left with nothing to write.