Q. You've written a lot of fanfic the past few weeks, haven't you? 120,000 words or so since the start of June, mostly Daria. Any comments for our readers about why?
A. Managing life stress, and heatwaves that make it too hot to go out and do anything. Most of my writing the past several years has gone into projects that were necessarily collaborative and curtailed, so taking a break with a medium that can be flagrantly idiosyncratic was refreshing.
Q. You'd written fanfic before, no?
A. Oh, yes, the biggest project being a novel and a series of related short pieces in which Daria crossed over with The Sandman. Of course, that was (Vera Drew voice) before the unpleasantness. I went back and invented a new fantasy world for the Daria characters to discover instead, so that if anyone wants the story but can't enjoy Sandman anymore, they have a version of it. Everything I've done with the Daria Makes A Deal Discontinuum since then has presumed the redux version to be "canonical".
Q. Are you involved in any fan forums?
A. No, never have been. And if Cenobite!Jane giving Daria erotic lumbar punctures wasn't enough to convince them that they don't want me, I'm sure that everything to do with the Mugwumps will. (Yes, I toned the Mugwump encounters down from my first draft.)
Q. Why Daria, beyond just liking the show?
A. I've liked plenty of shows and not been tempted to fanfic up a storm in their worlds: Archer and Inside Job and Red Dwarf, for example. Daria is full of hints that can be taken in so many different directions. It's about coming of age, or better said, coming of identity and independence. You can spin it dark or spin it fluffy, and both feel true to the source material.
It's a show from the End of History, when the story in the air was that the good guys had won, and the story just beneath that was a widening chasm nobody wanted to see head-on. When Daria and I were in high school, the cultural touchstones for me and every other teen I knew were The Matrix and Fight Club. Maybe there was calm, but there was malaise. Our '90s mood was a sense of deep rot imperfectly perceived, of systemic failure we had not the vocabulary to describe, of a world with no actual guardrails to stop it going off the cliff, and no path we could see to improvement or meaningful cause to take up. The '90s were the decade when Carl Sagan and Bill Watterson both told us, "There's nothing actually stopping our civilization from getting fuuuuuuuuuuucked."
Q. Do you write Daria herself autobiographically, then?
A. Across the many versions of Daria I have written, many of their problems are mine, or were mine at some point in my life, maybe recontextualized for drama or to fit better with the show. It's a matter of starting with a canon character I had weirdly many big and small commonalities with, and then building from there. Daria and I went to college in the same town at roughly the same time; why not turn my own angst into entertainment? That said, I didn't have a singular Jane during my high-school years, so how they interact is necessarily invented, or much more heavily recontextualized.
I didn't kiss a boy who was dating someone else at the time until college.
Q. You mentioned being in high school and college contemporaneously with Daria. When do you take the show as set?
A. The Daria chronology is a mess. How the fifth season is supposed to fit with the second movie, who knows.... In DMAD, I had them graduating Lawndale High in the spring of 2000. In my Vampire Edition series, I pushed it a year earlier: Daria is turned early in the fall of 1999, she and Jane start dating when Jane arrives in Boston in January 2000, and Jane is turned sometime early that next summer.
Q. You follow the fandom wiki-consensus that Lawndale is in Maryland, right?
A. It's in the part of Maryland that's an hour's drive from West Texas.
Q. You always have Jane going to Boston Fine Arts College, but in two different continuities, you have Daria go to MIT instead of Raft (the fictional Tufts). Why?
A. I did my undergrad there, so it's easy to mine for details about the setting in that time period. And maybe a bit more poignantly, it's a way for me to make a goofy little obscure tribute to an era that has passed, one bad administrative decision after another. It's also a way to look for interesting stories on the edges of the plausible. The show's Daria wants to be a writer, but she's a brain for all seasons: The only times we see her struggle with schoolwork is when it requires more than book learning. I've always pictured her as an omnivorous reader—any book is an escape to somewhere better than here—and so she probably has a lot of science knowledge socked away with history and literature. I could see her trying to span her interests by going into science journalism, for example.
Lawndale High doesn't seem to have math classes, presumably because the writers were already getting all the jokes they needed from Barch and O'Neill and DeMartino, and hiring a voice actor would have cost money they didn't have. Kara Wild took advantage of this lacuna back in the day. There's probably more that one could do with that.
Q. Are there any experiences in your own high-school or college life that you couldn't give to some version of Daria?
A. I was slightly more of a joiner of extra-curriculars, but part of that was just that my school was larger than Lawndale High seems to be, so there were a few more options for brainy types to try. I was briefly on the debate team, before it imploded amid interpersonal drama that I had nothing to do with. I was on the academic team for two years, and we won the state championship both times, which makes for plenty of inside jokes. That's way outside the lines of canon Daria, but her personality slots well into my memories. It feels natural for an AU.
Q. While you've written a few canon-compliant stories, you lean heavily on the "crack crossover" tag. What's the appeal there?
A. It's certainly not an appeal that everyone shares, but I myself like to play in multiple sandboxen at once. I think the juxtaposition can bring out interesting features of the originals. And the challenge of taking a premise like "Daria and Jane survive a Godzilla attack" and playing that completely seriously—that's a challenge which appeals to the weird kind of writer that I am.
Q. Several times, you've written Daria as into kink. Is that grounded in the show?
A. Any girl who can fail to notice that she's been pierced just because she's holding hands with her crush must have an interesting relationship between desire and pain.
But, more holistically, kink is a medium to explore issues of trust, of how one relates to one's own appearance, of emotional as well as physical intimacy. The Darias in DMAD and Vampire Edition seem to exist somewhere in the gray/demi zone of the asexuality spectrum, which I think is an interesting direction to take the hints in canon, and kinky activities are a way for characters to explore one another when one or more of them aren't particularly interested in sex per se.
And come on, the people who made the show called an episode "The Story of D". I'm going to celebrate them getting that past the network. (Though my only real memory of reading Story of O is wondering if these characters had any other hobbies. I had to look it up again to see if there was anything specific worth alluding to in "Strange Attraction Spreads Its Wings". I got a chapter title but not much else.)
Q. And you also wrote Daria as a sex-repulsed ace trans cyborg girl.
A. (in their best Daria monotone) Yep, nothing like giving the people what they want.
Q. The fans who study the issue generally conclude that Jane is a top. Why did you make her the submissive partner in the Vampire Edition series?
A. First, for variety and the surprise factor. Second, because Jane being someone who always wants to stay in control but is willing to cede that control to Daria on pure trust—that's an interesting dynamic, particularly when paired with a vaguely ace Daria. As Dina says in DOA, "I enjoyed your body and mind being my plaything within an arena in which I have no master."
Q. What's the most perverse thing you've ever written into a fic?
Q. Why did you have DL Morgendorffer come out as nonbinary in your Jarittany series?
A. I wrote that series one chapter at a time without a grand plan apart from the idea that each character would have a slice-of-life problem and the others would provide support. I sent them off to an open-studio show, and having a queer comics artist there was just verisimilitude. DL's strong reaction to something as simple as a shelf of zines got me thinking.
Q. Was it easier to imagine the nonbinary DL Morgendorffer or the trans man Jey Lane?
A. Jey. The idea for him started when I was writing a very, very loose sequel to riotsquirrrl's "Like a Wild, Frantic Bird", in which Daria is straight. How do you write a D/J story under those demanding conditions? The character of Jey flowed very naturally from that starting point. The end result is, I think, like his teenage self but with more quiet self-assurance under the exuberance.
On the other hand, DL might have my own label and live in my old apartment, but they don't have my life, and I didn't have an instant sense of their look and attitude.
Q. Did you learn anything from the whole writing experience?
A. Surely it has to have taught me something, right? I learned that it could be done—that I could physically produce that many words in that amount of time, juggling that many different continuities without confusing them, with alternate girlfriends for Trent and evilness levels for Tom, working equally well (or badly) in multiple styles. I learned what it feels like for a series to seem complete. While I could maybe think up a new entry for The Garden of Earthly Daria-Lights, I don't feel that there are gaps to fill.
If anyone else wants to try a project as excessive as this... stay hydrated? Skip the parts you are having trouble with. Jump ahead to the next chapter and fill in retrospectively; you might discover that your characters did not need to go through all the things that you had originally thought they did. When I hit the parts that I find particularly important, I write them out longhand first and type them up later. That way, I don't stress the word-by-word details on the first draft, because I know that I'll have a chance to revisit and revise everything. I did all of "Study of a Reclining Daria..." that way. I find it easiest to start with a premise, then decide where I want the characters to end up, and then determine the story beats I need to hit on the way. But in the process, fun things can happen that you can carry forward (like how "the lady or the tiger" morphed into the nickname "Tigerlily"). It's fanfiction: There's no net, but also no stakes.
Q. Favorite mental image you left yourself with?
Q. If you could for one night rock the look of any Daria you thought up, which would you pick?
A. The fetish gothette from "Dyes Wide Shut", or T'Ria of Vulcan in her bridal dress about to have her wedding plans joyfully disrupted.
Q. Of all the things that a Daria fanfic writer "needs" to know, what is your weakest area?
A. Music. I've always discovered new music slowly. I keep having to check that artists and songs I discovered later actually fit into the time period of a story, and I can notice myself returning to the same few wells, like Wendy Carlos.
Fortunately, one does not need a history of successful relationships to write Daria stories.
Q. What story are you the least satisfied with?
A. I decline to answer, as anything I say will invite people to say (perhaps justifiably) that another was much worse.
Q. What ship does the fandom need more of?
A. I've barely scratched the surface of what's possible with Jane/Daria/Brittany. And also Jane/Daria/OC. I think those could bring out lots of dynamics to have fun with. Canon-compliant Trent/Monique set in the show era would be interesting. Post-canon Tom/OC is a way to show him growing towards good or towards evil.
Q. What story do you have no interest in writing?
A. Any story where Daria and Jane fight and fail to reconcile because of something that happens in high school.
Q. What story do you think could work, but in the hands of a different author than yourself?
A. Anything dependent upon explicit straight sex. Trying to make that interesting is just not my jam.
Q. Would you be interested in seeing how other Daria fic authors answer these questions?
A. To the extent that they apply to anyone else, yes. No one but me is answerable for the Mugwump business.
Round 2!
Q. How long do you think the readers will put up with this gimmick?
A. It's the year Two Thousand Twenty-Six. The natural response to the Cenobites saying "We have such sights to show you" is "Woot, free vacation!". I'm going to be whimsical for a few minutes more.
Q. Have you found other fanfiction inspirational?
A. When I first got started, the Driven Wild Universe and The Angst Guy's "April is the Cruelest Month" set a standard of quality I knew I wanted to aim for. Neither of them have takes on the characters that come naturally to me, and I doubt that if you had given me the basic premise of either, I would have written anything like them. But the inspiring thing about Daria fic overall is just how good it can be when going off in a completely different direction from something else that is also quite good.
I hesitate to name too many names here, because the more I do, the more I feel like I'd be inadvertently slighting someone by omission. Or, you know, provoke someone into an I inspired THAT? What have I done wrong with my life?! reaction.
Q. How might your "April" have turned out differently, for example?
A. I don't think it would have occurred to me to bring Daria and Trent together. From my first viewing of the show, I always saw them as the couple that wasn't meant to work—the high-school crush that's doomed to failure and great for dark comedy. The point was for Daria to be vulnerable, to have needs she can't satisfy, to suffer uncertainty—all of the things that school would seldom cause for her. TAG's "April" gives a reason for Trent to change, to become someone who can work with Daria. I might have twisted the knife counter-clockwise and paired Trent off with someone else in the interim, so that a different character gets all the benefits of matured!Trent while Daria has to live under the same roof with them. I'm not saying the original made the wrong call—again, I read that story and knew I wanted to write something as good—just that I'd take the premise in an alternate direction and try generating my own flavor of angst.
Q. Do you think you approach the show in a notably different way than other authors?
A. The oldest fic in the fandom, of course, was written while the show was still airing. That doesn't just affect obvious things like where the characters end up going to college. It also means that if you start writing now, your natural take on a character's early actions might be informed by what they do later. You can read Trent through "Fire!" and Jake through "Boxing Daria" and Tom through Is It College Yet?. You have the full set of nuances that canon provides always with you. That doesn't necessarily mean you'll like a character more, but you might like writing them more, and your instincts for how they could develop might be different.
Q. What moments in your stories would you most like to see as fanart?
A. If any of my freakish brain outputs ever nudge anyone to creativity of their own, I'll be happy. I almost don't want to give specifics, since surely what matters most is which images resonate with a reader who wants to pick up a pen (or digital brush tool, etc.).
I can say that sometimes I wrote starting with a mental image that resonated with me and then trying to make words that lived up to it. Daria's drunken accusation/confession to Alison at the climax of "Strange Attraction" is one example. Daria taking off her jacket to reveal her party ensemble in "Dyes Wide Shut" was another. So too for Jane as a cyberpunk hero, waiting for a contact on a Dejima streetcorner; Daria falling through a nightmare of the net; Daria leaning over the bar in San Antonio, New Mexico to whisper into Jane's ear; Jane approaching Daria in the surf of the Atlantic and everything that happens in the tent later; vampire!Daria biting Jane for the first time; T'Ria and D'Jane sharing their favorite pizza with the Lower Deckers and Boimler powering through the Klingon vengeance pepper.
I'd be curious to see how someone else visually interprets DL Morgendorffer and Jey Lane. DL is pretty low-key in their actions—I almost see them drawn as a model sheet. If you want to go smexy, try drawing Jey in bed with Daria while she is only wearing his old red jacket from the show.
Q. You said earlier that The Garden of Earthly Daria-lights feels like a complete series to you. Which of the excessive number of series that you started feels the least complete?
A. The Romance of T'Lyn and Beckett Mariner currently leaves Boimler/Alaric and Rutherford/Tendi unresolved, and with T'Ria and D'Jane potentially looking for a new planet to make home. Maybe it needs one more story where everyone can meet in person again. [Edit to add: OK, I wrote that story.]
Honorable mention: What's Tom up to in the continuity where Jane is Hell Priest of the Cenobites and Daria is their faithful acolyte?
Q. Why did you switch to second-person narration for one of the Vampire AU stories?
A. Because that story needed to be a little trashy. It's pulpy and decadent. I like experimenting with form—in the science-fiction murder mystery novel I wrote during and after college, a section is a pseudo-Shakespearian play—and this was a chance to have fun in a very AO3 way.
Q. What forms would you like to see more experimentation with?
A. Poetry. Come on, who's going to write Daria's love sonnets to Jane?