A log of the chat with Vickie Tern.

by Vickie Tern,
Edited by Anne-Mal

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Chat guest: Vickie Tern
On Saturday December 4, 1999 12PM
Edited by Anne-Mal

You can e-mail Vickie at:
[email protected]

>Before we go to the chat, Vickie is such a pleasure to read, here are some answers from the questionnaire!

I can chat now with pleasure!

I'm much less conflicted or inhibited or timid now than a few weeks ago. First, I just spent a week at a gender meeting with lots of all kinds of TG-concerned or TG-impacted folk. See the opening section of "A Place of her Own" for what gender meetings do to my stealth tendencies. Second, on return I plunged into a knockdowndragout flame war on another list with some supercilious woman who thinks TVs in general and TG fantasy fiction in particular beneath contempt (but bend to express their contempt anyhow). I exposed a lot of myself to them in anger. So I can't not expose myself to fellow writers here with genuine curiosity about how this mysterious creative process works.

Let's go down your questions and then see what's left to say. You'll see I LOVE being "on". Narcissism Spoken Here!

>Where did the name "Vickie Tern" come from?

I was a practicing closeted TV for many years, utterly isolated from any others. Playing computer games maybe ten years ago, it occurred to me I could enter a female name for me among the high scorers, it was another way to look into a mirror and see myself as feminine. Over a few years I used different names, but none felt quite right. I did want to confess my TV nature in code, at least, anyhow. So I finally settled on VT, being a backward TV.

"Victoria" because I've read a lot about that splendid, regal, pompous age (and its prudish, rather dull Queen with the triumphant-seeming name). I like the ironies in the name read that way, no less because I'm a homebody.

"Tern" because I've spent a lot of time on the ocean's shore, and I have a special feeling for that nervous little shore bird strutting and pecking on the edge of a huge ocean, but occasionally also wheeling and diving over it for scraps left over left by voracious fish beneath. Just right for the shy girl I felt myself.

The "ie" spelling on the end of "Vickie" because that's a diminutive too, unlike "Vicky" which strikes me as a complete name, or "Vicki" which strikes me as very mod, very smart. "Vickie Tern." That's me!

When I discovered the Net's TG communities maybe seven years ago, it felt as if the top of my head blew off! Others like me! I could take on a social existence, talking to those others on the Net! And I did, very shy at first, very experimental. But I had a gendered name. And the first time I could say "That's just darling" to someone I had a gendered voice as well as a name!

Later still, the lady with that name wrote a first story ("Jack and Jill") and fed them into A.S.S. and A.S.S.TG where they disappeared. Of all things, I was on long distance to Sierra downloading one night when Mindy broke in and introduced herself and called me a "good writer." Talk about a thrill! There was little feedback in those days. Mindy's praise ranked with Celeste ranking "Nice" (my third or fourth story) #5 of the year's hundred best. I never knew if she thought highly of it because it was a good story or because it was literate. During the intervening years I've gotten a lot more confident. More like a gull. Like a little gull all grown up! :-)

>If you have a home page, what is the URL if you wish it to be known?

Don't have one. Wish I did. I no longer feel the (male) territorial imperative to master the machines and procedures needed to make one. But no doubt will one day.

I'm not a computer freak, and I've lost my American Boy's birthright curious eagerness to meddle into and understand any machine or procedure. I mean to make a website (AOL entitles me free), but the challenge bores me in prospect. I'd rather spend the day writing smut.

>What are the next stories you are working on?

I've just looked into my workbasket. There are six substantially under way, that is, six already over 50k Two of them already over 100k.

One is about a suite of college girls who decide to cure a freshman boy of his disabling shyness with girls by -- guess how. The others are like most of my stories about love and fidelity and need and deception and ulterior motives inside a marriage, each with a different reason why a man should wish to be feminized (or agree to it) and a different reason why a wife should wish it (or wish to trick him into it).

I move from one to another when I hit a crux or boredom, and find that in the interval some ideas for it have ripened. Or -- my curse -- I abandon for a while whatever I'm doing if I should get an idea for an altogether new story. If it can be a quickie I write it over a few days. Sometimes I'm wrong that it's a quickie. Stories dictate themselves at their own pace and length. I just write them down (and then revise the hell out of them).

>Is there anything special that you would like mentioned?

Vickie Tern Will Bare All! Will Tell the Shocking and Bizarre Truth About her Own Marriage, the Reason Why She Creates her Tales of Dominating Wives and Feminized Husbands!

Confidentially, what's shocking is that I'm male, monogamous, faithful! On Y2K Day (January 1) I will celebrate a fiftieth wedding anniversary!. True! I'm partially transgendered, a now-finally-altogether-unashamed (if discreet) CD, and my wife, a professional with her own career, is gentle, loving, rather dependent on me, tolerating but absolutely non-participating, wishes I didn't or wasn't, stubbornly vanilla. That combination requires a lively fantasy life. The wives in my stories are my own various compulsions playing cunning games to gratify themselves, and the husbands are variously the compliant remaining parts of me who learn to accept it all, even love it.

>So let's start the real chat...

+ Darkside has arrived.

+ Vickie has arrived.

(*Anne-Mal) Hello Darkside! Welcome honored guest!

(Darkside) Hi Y'all

(*Anne-Mal) So how are you feeling Vickie?

Don't tell me that Vickie is speechless!

(Vickie) Hah! Found the bottom of the page, where I reply. Also my fingers, most of them anyhow.

(*Anne-Mal) Gee, everyone is quiet!

(Vickie) It isn't that I'm speechless, I love to talk. It's that I still type with a club and a quill pen, and it's slow the old fashioned way.

(Darkside) Sorry. I'm shopping as I do this as well.

(Vickie) What for?

(*Anne-Mal) Oh, so if Vickie mentions something she needs you may buy it for her on Christmas?

(Vickie) Ahem, maybe just tell you my sizes and let your imagination choose? ;-)

(Darkside) Shopping. This n' that, mainly that. I still have her presents from last year.

(Vickie) I drank yours, all but one bottle.

(*Anne-Mal) Ah, I never knew that the two of you wrote interactively!

(Darkside) Anne, don't feel too left out. VT and me, yeah we do sometimes. She corrects all the 10000's of errors in my stories while I read hers right through.

(Vickie) I've met two of us in their three dimensional form, Darkside and Rhonda Wagram, I am privileged to report. Through this medium, originally as mutual admirers, too.

(*Anne-Mal) Gee, I keep seeing the name, Rhonda Wagram all the time, though I have never seen her work. Where does she mostly write?

(Vickie) I should have cued her especially about today. She'd love to be here to needle me. We once did a year-long collaboration, and disagreed over plot or character only once. I can tell about it later if you wish, since she isn't able to contradict and defy.

(*Anne-Mal) Where does she mostly put her stories?

(Vickie) Rhonda has a profession she gets lost in now and then. Lost to us, that is. Her stories come in spouts now and then,. The collaboration ended up in print, not the Net, because she'd never seen herself in print. (I had.)

(*Anne-Mal) Oh, her stuff appears professionally!

(Vickie) No. She's a determined amateur (lover) of this kind of writing, but just hasn't time for it, not as much as she'd wish. She has a much more boring profession, as she says, which is why she does this at all. TG fiction-writing for the full, well-rounded life! (that could be a tag for a Fictionmania Picture.)

(*Anne-Mal) I just wonder, I see she has two stories on FM, but she is cited by many as an inspiration.

(Darkside) VT, I never knew you'd wanted to do a tag for a FM picture?

(Vickie) I have all sorts of secret ambitions, but not all sorts of talents to match. Rhonda is a wonderful person. I'll be sure to see she sees I said so.

(Darkside) I'm still trying to remember that guess the number thing that Carrie Gore did last night. Anne, you got the logs for it?

(*Anne-Mal) Well if you multiply any number between 2-9 by nine and add the digits you get nine. You subtract nine by five and get four, and the fourth letter is D.

(Vickie) Is Jack Chalker that difficult to track down? How did you do it?

(*Anne-Mal) Nope, just asked! So where did you find Rhonda's stories?

(Vickie) I didn't. I posted "Girl's Night Out" and she wrote praising it and suggesting a sequel. There followed a year of swapping chapters and sketching further plot developments. And overwriting each other, no ego problems at all. Astonished when once in process she sent me hers, two of them anyhow. There's a third in her native language (it isn't English though she's utterly fluent and idiomatic.), that may emerge some day.

Hey, let's get her on here to deal with all of us. It could encourage more writing of what WE like to see her write, not what clients want.

(Morgan) Well since we haven't started yet. Hi, again Vickie! :)

(Vickie) Hi Morgan!

(Morgan) I did my home work and read the two stories Vickie! :)

(Vickie) The two stories aren't my most popular, but I like them for my own reasons

(*Anne-Mal) Okay, lets start!

(Vickie) Should I be feeling like the Virgin on the Aztec Altar awaiting the High Priest's arrival?

(*Anne-Mal) Today's chat guest is Vickie Tern!

(Troy) Applauding

(*Anne-Mal) To me Vickie is THE TG author! She was the first author I found on a Newsgroup!

(Vickie) There fustest with the mostest? In some ways I suppose.

(Darkside) Hooray!

(*Anne-Mal) When I first went to the web she was the most articulate of the authors I had seen and have always been impressed with her works! (Thank the maker I can fix the errors in the log!)

(Vickie) For me, what entranced me utterly was an anonymous story called "Boy2Girl". Lovely and charming and seductive. That was my first TG story proper, showing me what the attractions could be.

(*Anne-Mal) So without further ado, I give you Ms. Tern! Do you have an opening statement?

(Vickie) Only that you get me fast or you get me accurate but not both. I type with two fingers. Primitive, but I do arrive eventually!

My heavens, that was accurate!

OK, a statement. I call everything I write fantasy, because the reference is to the desirable and plausible, almost never to the actual or probable. So I work darker corners of desire that way. Yet I almost never do SF or Magic. I suspect it's because the process of conversion to the other gender is what fascinates, not what then happens.

I have five unfinished beginnings of stories in which the reasons for conversion are established and plausible, but where should they then go? That takes real thinking, not fantasizing.

(Darkside) Vickie, You've often said (to me anyway) that you prefer CD/TV stories to the magic kind. Why is that (apart from the reason above)?

PS. I'm after a little more than it doesn't fascinate me, why doesn't it? :)

(Vickie) Reason above mainly. For me gendercrossing is a little wicked, forbidden tampering with deep taboos. So it needs nudging. If too quick or easy the sense of the forbidden disappears. To become that which is desired! Aha! Slurp, slaver! To be tricked into it though, because I detest force !

(Darkside) So a slow transform is more fascinating rather than wham bang thank you wizard?

(Vickie) Yep. In most of my stories the revelation to the hapless man of how deep a pit he's dug, or to the reader of how far the narrator has gone without apparently realizing it, is where the art is. Disclosures little by little, entrapments more and more intense.

(Morgan) I enjoy the slow transform too. Do you prefer the male to be aware or unaware, partially aware of what's happening?

(Vickie) Nice guy, willing to cooperate to please the woman, but altogether unaware how far she means to take him. Or why she really wants him to do it. I've got a query. The story "True Love" got very strong feedback as unpleasant. Anyone here find the humiliation too painful? Humiliation there always is, as something to be finally overcome.

(Morgan) Too painful for my tastes :)

(*Anne-Mal) A story is a story.

(Darkside) After what Dr. Bexley put her victims through in "Fury", "True Love" was tame. No gratuitous violence there.

(Vickie) Is that also true of "Trust Me"? I wondered whether the embarrassments I put my characters through are too close to what readers actually fear. I used to, don't any more. (I did say in my Bio I'm TV and not ashamed any more.)

(Morgan) For me yes, but I have "definite" tastes in TG fiction that result in only partial embracing of Vickie's recurrent themes.

(Vickie) What's most troublesome or least wanted. What's best liked? I'm still working over why "A Place Of Her Own" has twice the hits of any of my other stories have on average.

(*Anne-Mal) Well, if it gets too bad I can always just stop reading!

(Vickie) But Anne Mal, then you don't get to the twist "things aren't what they seem" part of it, which is for me the rest of the fun. Sort of like detective stories in which the truth emerges but never as you'd think it.

(*Anne-Mal) I never said I stop reading your stories!

(Vickie) When did you start reading? I was appalled to find I've been writing for nearly four years!

(Darkside) I think "Jack and Jill" was the first VT story I read.

(Vickie) That was my first. I didn't even know how to paragraph dialogue then (as you now do!)

(*Anne-Mal) Only four years! Well, that was about when I got a computer with internet capacity.

(Vickie) The net was then BBSs. I found one on the west coast with TG stories and my head exploded with joy. Then found Sierra, ditto!

(AlisonW) I see from your Bio that you were involved in teaching, how has this helped your story writing?

(Vickie) I hate clichés, obvious turns of plot, and bad sentence rhythms. Because I'm a better critic than I am a writer, alas. Critics are made, talent is born.

Teaching gave me a sense, you've started this, go with it and see where you end up. Not always where I'd wish. But sometimes, marvelous discoveries. Anyhow, I write a story like that. Dive in and see if you can hit and swim. Or flap and fly!

(Morgan) Do you prefer the male to be aware or unaware of the changes occurring in your stories Vickie and why?

(Vickie) Depends, Morgan. If the woman (always the person feminizing him) is malicious, I want him to know it by the end. But acquiring consent can be the first thing the woman does with the man. I DON'T want him to know her REAL reasons until it's too late.

In a story like "Choices", the man's led deliberately step by step into the pit. Until there's no way for him to back out. Yet he knows, he just doesn't see all the consequences at each step.

(Morgan) That's part of the emotional tension that works very well in your writing, an aspect I very much enjoy.

(Vickie) Thanks. That's where I have a good time being the entrapping woman. Nostrumo used to protest that my men were too wimpish, going along. Maybe. I make them more deliberate or skeptical now. But it doesn't help! :-)

(Darkside) Vickie, you have this aura(rightly or wrongly) of being mysterious, an enigma. Did you do this on purpose?

(Vickie) Lots of readers WANT me to be my women, and that mystique helped them enjoy the stories. I hesitated a long time before blowing cover in my Bio. Didn't post a Bio until a few weeks ago!

There are lots of subs who need a domme, and my dommes (that part of me?) are ideal. We're not dealing with easy access areas of human eroticism here. A lot of what I write is explicitly erotic.

I was many stories in before "Flowers", the first one I could offer to the AOL TG site in payment for the stories I read there when I needed them (in a way). They want nothing explicitly erotic or sexual. Even a joke like "Designated cocksucker" (as in baseball) had to be converted to "designated mouth". Not because I have a dirty mind (nothing wrong there, I just don't), but because my characters are under compulsion, and erotic desire is a powerful way for a woman to manipulate them. And reward them for complying.

(AlisonW) Which authors do you admire and why?

(Vickie) Hard to select. Of the Fictionmaniacs, Pervy and Pamela for the innocent charm in the ways their characters are turned, I simply can't do that, wish I could. Tigger for the argumentative, polemical style. People there are always persuading each other.

SUKI for the same sense of wicked sinfulness I write and enjoy.

Carol Collins for cunning.

I started out trying to be Parker (for the hapless entrapments) and Deirdre (for the compulsive erotic behavior leading in strange directions).

Rachel Varga triggered the marital sagas, wife entrapping husband. Primary violations of trust and love, sometimes to mutual advantage, sometimes not. So I've stayed with husband and wife ever since.

Hi Nostrumo. I commented earlier you were unhappy with my hubby wimps. Any better these days?

(Nostrumo) Vickie, yes you did, I liked your last one. :)

(Vickie) Because he got even at the end? Maybe I should have more of that. But she REALLY tricked him for her own career, not for his own good as she saw it (as other wives do).

(Morgan) Why are many, if not all of your feminizing women so impersonal, detached, and seemingly cold to the male they've ensnared?

(Vickie) That's not easy. In "Jack and Jill" the wife didn't like his crossdressing to begin with, and in a way was avenging herself because he wasn't the man she thought she'd married. That's a fear lots of crossdressers have (and transsexuals have really serious ones).

Other times, in my second story, "Soooo Sweet", the wife is lovey dovey and just admires and loves her feminized hubby to death. Doesn't realize she's exploiting him for her own self-satisfaction. She's too enthusiastic to notice.

I always have problems with "Why should a wife wish to do this" as I do with "Why should a husband wish to go along". These are solved in different ways. More often than not these days the wives are trying to be helpful. But some are disappointed women who act that way. As wives do. Not personal. Mine worried but never forebade or resented. Now is at ease with it.

(Darkside) Any stories that you've written that you wished never seen the light of day?

(Vickie) Lord!! "Friends" started well, but I never want to reread it, afraid of what I'll find.

I'd rewrite the ending of "Happening" in a shot, I threw the twist away. Nobody sees it. Not even me sometimes.

My favorite is still the most recent. Because the narrator at the beginning is very close to what I am and where I am. Only in the beginning mind, the rest is fantasy. And it seems to be the most satisfying of the lot. Why still a puzzlement in part.

I like "Trust Me" for its origins, that reversal/discovery moment when the hotel clerk asks the wife "And will your husband be joining you?" the husband alongside dressed as a woman, and hubby hears her say "Yes, when he comes, send him up!" That story was written so I could use that scene!

(Nostrumo) I would like to know what had brought you the field of TG?

(Vickie) It's in my Bio, so here goes. I've been a crossdresser all my life. Compulsive, glorying, ashamed, fearful of discovery. Five years ago found the TG parts of the Net and others like me. Then the fiction. Then the fiction I especially liked.

Then when I ran out of that, found I could write my own and enjoy doing it. That it wasn't too bad! That some writers I admired admired it! That's the best part of the Fictionmania ethos! We get to meet each other!

Fantasy is what makes up for realities that you'd never risk, or wouldn't really want because of everything else that really comes with it.

(AlisonW) Can you give any words of wisdom to those who want write their first TG Story?

(Vickie) Wisdom, humph!! Do it. No apologies. Keep going until done. Then revise. If it pleases you (or arouses you, whatever) it will others. We are none of us that different!

There are people here who'll help with a weak draft, make it stronger, but a draft is needed!

So the best advise is, to be a writer, write. I wish I'd known that way back!!

(AlisonW) Thanks Vickie. I have to leave, bye.

(Carrie) Hi Vickie. Sorry I'm late, all! :)

(Vickie) Hi Carrie. Love your stuff!

(Carrie) Well, same here!

(*Anne-Mal) As I have said, I first found you on a Newsgroup. What kind of response have you gotten from it? (Besides offers of marriage?)

(Vickie) The first responses were crucial. Celeste was just getting started, and she found a weakness in a story I found I could repair easily. (Nice!) Parker eventually praised "Back Door" as worthy of him, so I quit trying at that point to do his kind of entrapments (unrelentingly cruel, some).

Until some dozen people found virtue in "Jack and Jill", the first, I had no idea whether it held up. I liked lots in it. These days with the Newsgroups spammed, no one can stumble onto a new writer any more. Even I rarely look.

(Nostrumo) Well, you explained why you wrote all these couple stories with domineering wives, but is there a story category you would like to write of or is there an idea in you mind which wants to let free which is not a couple story?

(Vickie) Good query. I have a five story backlog, unfinished, all couples. Yet "JayCee" is my favorite voice, because so new and different from any of the others (or my own), and lots of times it's the voice that tells the story, discovers the story in fact. I should launch out as a wholly new character to see where she or he leads me. That's the joy of writing, really. That and closing off, finishing well, like a tight jigsaw puzzle.

Have I one in mind at the moment? No. Next moment? Maybe :-)

(Nostrumo) In anticipation and patience, we are waiting. ;)

(Vickie) Any choices preferred? A male graduate student with certain proclivities? I have a mean boor male voice and a 4/5 done story he tells. Too unpleasant to finish! ;-)

(Nostrumo) Errr, next question! Blush

(Carrie) Vickie, I am in awe of your ability to write such popular stories. "A Place of her Own" is pure TG Fiction and hits all the right buttons! How do you know, in your mind, when you're onto a winning plot line?

(Vickie) Thank you! It did with me! But lots of mine do though not with others. I'm still working out how come in this case. Not as mean as some?

(Carrie) Hmmm, I think different stories do different things for different people. :)

(Vickie) I like the motivations, and they reveal themselves gradually,. The REAL motivations (the twist at the end of my tales) emerge as naturally. But I don't always know them until near the end. Then I revise back to prepare for them.

Incidents occur as ways to reveal further entrapments or desires. They come easily, if the basic premise is sound. Not all are. I write into holes and there the story stays!

An oddity is, I'd never treat another human being the way my characters do all the time. Yet even they don't blackmail or bully.

(Carrie) Thanks Vickie! :)

(*Anne-Mal) Would you like to meet one of your characters in real life?

(Vickie) O Lord! Maybe I have? A few I've modeled on people I know. Pearl in "Girl's Night Out" is a sharp witted, shrewd woman I know.

The wives I've encountered as administrators, and I have as little to do with them as I can, sometimes. Some of the wives! :-)

The husbands are variants of me I suppose. The wives variants of my own compulsions. In that sense I meet them all the time!

(Nostrumo) How your initial idea emerge? Like a picture in your mind, a smell which triggers memories or what?

(Vickie) You set up the nasty character and the likelihood that's how she'd be. I like the irony that for love, supposedly, people will do the meanest, most self-aggrandizing things, and never think it so.

(Darkside) What puts you off doing 'darker' stories? Your guest chapter in the "Fury Directive" was nastier than anything I could've come up with!

(Vickie) I don't like hurting others even in fantasy. There's enough pain in the real world, undeserved. But your main character, Darkside, is one of the most fatale femme fatales I've ever met! So when she decides to have a vengeful honeymoon, what can I do? I write it that way! It was not easy!

(Darkside) I thought smut came easy to you. It doesn't to me, smut is the hardest for me to write!

(Vickie) I've said, alas, I'm as vanilla and conventional as they come in actuality (but for the touch of TG). So writing my first M/M scenes came VERY hard. The one in "Jack and Jill" had to be humiliating in detail, imagined in detail.

(*Anne-Mal) Smut! We are talking about Vickie's stories aren't we?

(Vickie) Now I can do such scenes easily, on paper! :-)

But eroticism is where characters are least in control of themselves, and my characters are always being manipulated by people who know how to use that eroticism. So I find I write lots of smut, filth, etc. My SO would be appalled to read any of it!

(Carrie) Hate to dash off, but I can't stay. I hope you have a great chat Vickie, bye!

(Morgan) My apologies to all, but I must leave. Thanks Vickie for a great chat!

(Darkside) Nearly time for your evening meal isn't it Vickie? Or have you got a hall pass?

(Vickie) Shall we end it, Anne-Mal? I've had a good time! Could go on.

(*Anne-Mal) If you wish, do you have a closing statement?

(Darkside) I'm easy, either way. As usual Vickie wrote so much down I have to re-read it a few times to get all of it. Better hurry up with those chat logs Anne!

(*Anne-Mal) So do you get much feedback for your stories?

(Vickie) Feedback. Some. The occasional generic "love them", which is always cheering. Pervy will sometimes comment in detail. A few others. Not a lot. By now I'm on my own. Even Rhonda says "What can I say? I liked it! (or didn't)."

So I write to satisfy me, but with an eye out for what people seem to like. I have to respect that.

(*Anne-Mal) Well, one of the few stories I wrote was "The Things You Do For Love", a story puzzle which is a homage to you and Steve Zink.

(Darkside) But the 'people' like SRU stories, if you believe the hit counts. Any chance of a VT SRU story?

(Nostrumo) Chuckle The old man gets a wife with some wit! :)

(Vickie) I would have to shift my own perverse attention from the ACT of feminizing to an odd or curious result of it. That could happen. I wrote "Charmed" as a challenge story for someone I owed a favor, who asked people to write a story about a painting he liked.

I should try an SRU fast and then see if it's any good. Maybe not. The juice for me is in the corrupting of masculinity. COULD do that after the physical conversion, true. Hmmmm!

(Michelle) Yes, but the wizard MIGHT have something to say about that.

(Vickie) The wizard isn't me, in my imagination. I'd have to be wary of him!!

(*Anne-Mal) Did you like "My Letter to the Editor", the story written because of a bet?

(Darkside) Careful what you say Vickie, I know this Doctor. :-)

(Vickie) I liked Letters, yes. Because it worked. Also because Darkside uses such a huge canvas I couldn't tell if he could do a miniature, so to speak.

(*Anne-Mal) So do you think it is a good thing if authors are 'forced' to write stories?

(Vickie) The Bet premise is so often used that to make it fresh is hard. Often used because a good premise, no fault there!

(Darkside) The bet was my idea, I lost. So Vickie didn't do the forcing. She even offered to let me off but being honorable I did it anyway

(*Anne-Mal) But it did let you stretch!

(Vickie) In Darkside's case, it enforced shrinkage!! :-)

(Darkside) Yep. I still find it hard to write a story in less than 150K. That's why it takes me so long to write one! Vickie's punishment of a story in less than 50K was harsh indeed.

(Darkside) So the rule of thumb is don't bet against Vickie Tern!

(Vickie) Snarl snarl. Take that, Darkside! And count each K as delivered!

(Nostrumo) Vickie, do you think you could write a story in the Aunt Jane story line?

(Vickie) Aunt Jane? Yes. I like frumpy modern women like that. I don't usually write third person (only "Dolls", in fact), but that's a good universe to enter. I've chatted with Tigger about some of the drafts of his stories in that world, and they're fun.

(Nostrumo) So when we could expect a story there?

(Vickie) Aunt Jane stories are LOOONG ones. I write slowly. Lemme think of a premise, and I could tell you. Would ask Tigger about it early on, because he loves to live there.

(Nostrumo) I think a lot of closet CD/TV's would like to met Aunt Jane. :).

(Vickie) Say, Aunt Jane does a grownup miscreant male, instead of her boys? I could relate to that! Father of the bride as the next bride?

(Nostrumo) More like a father brought his son and was forced to stay there for some reason.

(Vickie) Good idea, Nostrumo. Will see if that seed grows.

(Darkside) If you liked Vickie's previous one's you'll love her new one! (Which I've just done reading.)

(Vickie) I haven't written the end yet, only framed it. Not too dark, Dark?

(Darkside) Spot on. out before Y2k?

(Nostrumo) It have to be before Y2k because after that the Net will not be the same as it is now.

(*Anne-Mal) Do you think it important that authors get their stories read by someone they trust beforehand?

(Vickie) Yes. I've always sent my things to someone, even if they can only glance. So I can feel there's no major gaffe or self-indulgence in it.

Or blame it on them afterward if so! ;-)

(Darkside) I do, Vickie is my trustworthy proof reader. She did most of the proofing on "Fury" (all 1.9Mb of it), a feat which I am forever in her debt.

In my humble opinion it's essential to have someone like that!

(Vickie) And so I make you read my drafts now. But you picked up on proofing fast!

I admired the hell out of "Fury", as you know. The Chesswork POV shifts were astonishing!

Proofing is an excuse to read carefully and try to figure what is really going on.

(Darkside) Blush Vickie, has Anne tried to recruit you into one of the two camps? (Axis and Allies?)

(*Anne-Mal) Since both of you are established writers, would you join a writer's workshop? Syela has proposed one, to improve the quality of the stories.

(Vickie) Sure. Time permitting. Established meaning a somebody out there likes us? Or am I walking into a buzzsaw?

(Darkside) I'd be glad to help, but real life is very real at the moment. I'm always willing to lend a hand.

(*Anne-Mal) Actually she means it for serious writers to improve their work, rather than something for beginners.

(Vickie) I work over whoever asks me, really good writers like DS, Tigger or newbies. I like good stories and when I can help, better stories. There's a matter of affinity of course. I doubt I could do much for Morpheus other than mis-steer him.

(*Anne-Mal) Which brings up another question, have you ever gotten a criticism that actually helped you out?

(Vickie) That quest can hurt! Celeste's query about Nice (Why didn't the husband just pick up and leave?), found a major hole I could fill with a few additional paragraphs here and there. Parker told me to give up on a really Mean narrator's story, just too unpleasant!

The collaboration with Rhonda turned one nice 70k story into a massive but readable 650k novel (MagsInc pub's but we kept the e-rights, and maybe should give it out finally.) She helped me enormously. We disagreed over whether to, um emasculate the hero(ine) at the end. So that issue was managed delicately.

(Darkside) Vickie, I've gotta go now. It's been great. Thanks Vickie, it's been very informative.

(Vickie) Good talking, DS. As always!

(*Anne-Mal) So you are now a professional author? (You got paid.)

(Vickie) Enough for a good dinner out. Better than Burger King, anyhow. Actually, MagsInc paid in kind, access to much of his inventory of TG stories. I have yet to pick them!

(Vickie) Sissify.Com paid me flowers once, and a small check another time, for the right to put up some stories on their pay website. Other than that I don't think there are fortunes to be made in TG. It's too easily written to the level of satisfaction many readers look for. Good question for Jack Chalker! Is there a living in it?

(*Anne-Mal) As PJ would say, what about Shakespeare!

(Vickie) He kept an interest in the Acting Company and the Theater both. Triple dipped! They still pirated him. There's an hilarious version of Hamlet where the actor playing Claudius dictated the play to a pirate printer. He remembered his lines, and mangled everyone else's!

(Nostrumo) Vickie, you mentioned the collaborative work with Rhonda. I had read a bit of it and wonder how you could get that nasty from the more innocent beginnings.

(*Anne-Mal) (Wicked imagination?)

(Nostrumo) I have to leave now, sorry. It was nice to read you! Ciao :)

(*Anne-Mal) Okay, let's call it a night! Do you have a closing statement?

(Vickie) So long, N! Thanks for hearing me out. I love to see what I say, so I'll know what I think! Bye all!

(*Anne-Mal) Well for me it was a pure pleasure!

     • Vickie just left.

(*Anne-Mal) You have always been one of my idols here on the web!

Oh well, she will at least see that in the log!

End of chat
 
 
Chatting with Vickie Tern  © 2000 by Vickie Tern. May be made available free to individuals, but all rights to any fees or royalties are reserved. If you want to post this anywhere else, please ask the author for permission first. Thank you.

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