Alara Rogers' Writing Journal - July 7th, 2006

Written for the Thelma and Louise ficathon put on by thassalia, for Apathy.

Herein hangs a tale.

I thought the Thelma and Louise ficathon was supposed to be about two women. But when I got my assigment, the various requests all included one woman. So I thought I'd misunderstood and the story was supposed to simply be about the one woman if that was what your recipient requested.

Many ideas regarding Mystique suggested themselves to me. Given my own life circumstances (I just had a baby June 5th), I found myself obsessing over Mystique-as-mother. Ideas about Mystique and a mutant grandchild of her hated non-mutant son, Mystique and a baby clone, all sorts of Mystique-and-a-baby ideas popped into my head. And yet, when it came time to write, I found that I was, after all, too horrified by what had been done to Mystique and Magneto's relationship in X3, and I had to explain and resolve that scene.

So here I am, almost done, racing the clock to get done by the end of July 5th, which was the deadline. Other people had posted fics, so I went and checked them out. And all of them were about two women.

So I checked the rules again (should have done that the first time), and realized to my horror that I had misunderstood. It said clearly that you write a story about the first character requested, that any other characters are merely a suggestion, but that the point of the whole thing is female-female interaction. Which was what I'd thought when I signed up for the thing. So a story about Mystique and Magneto did not count.

Desperately I hunted around for Mystique and another woman who hasn't been done to death, which rules out Rogue and Irene Adler... and so I fell back on Mystique and a baby. And wrote the whole damn thing in two days. Without any reference materials. Or having ever read a single comic with Margali Szardos in it. Don't try this at home, kids.

Thus, this may very well suck, but since I started it on the day of the deadline I don't have time to check my references. If I discover I have totally screwed something up I will probably revise. I am, however, quite deliberately contradicting the story Mystique told in X-Men Unlimited #4, despite the fact that Marvel has apparently retold the story since then with added details, such as Nightcrawler being rescued by a mysterious dad. Who is a demon. Uh, ok. I never believed that the story happened the way Mystique told it, and she's a notorious liar, so this is my version of how things happened.

(Oh, and BTW, this does mean I have a post-X3 Mystique and Magneto story sitting on my hard drive about ten paragraphs or less away from being done. Special bonus for me being stupid. Expect me to post that in a few days, maybe after Multiverse is done.)

( Mother to Mother )