Why we picked her:

It is with reverence that I refer to BT as an "old schooler" - a woman who has been active in fandom since the Internet was a thing of the distant future. She's been writing fanfic since roughly 1980, starting with "fringe" fantasy series such as Darkover in the SF/fantasy print fandom, then moving to Star Trek and Star Wars. Her first fandom in which she wrote "more than incidental pieces" was Star Wars, a fandom that experienced a huge boom with Empire Strikes Back. She's read, collected and sometimes written for Blakes 7, Professionals, UNCLE, War of the Worlds, Babylon 5, Due South, X-Files and now SG-1. Two of her Eroica stories are crossovers with another manga/anime series, Patalliro, and one of her B5 stories is a crossover with the anime series Rose of Versailles. Her most recent anime interest is Shoujo Kakumei Utena. You can find BT's Eroica writing at Eroica Fan Fiction.

I know everyone hates this question, but how do you get inspired? What would you recommend for people who have trouble finding story ideas?

Look around, read non-fannish books, watch good or bad movies, watch people. Feed your base of knowledge and information. Eventually it will speak back in the context of your favorite obsession.

Alternatively, read fanfic until you find something that's so awful or simply wrong that you have to fix it, and then do it right.

When you're reading, are there any aspects that can make or break a fic for you? What impresses you and what turns you off?

One turn-off is cliched description or a cliched plot set-up in the first scene. Another is a first couple of paragraphs that flat-footedly explain everything about the universe and character background. It should eventually be clear that Major Eberbach is a German working for NATO Intelligence pursued romantically by an English art thief called Eroica who is also an earl -- but not all in the first sentence.

Confusion of "lay" and "lie" is so common that I despair of seeing it improve across the board -- but a despairing state of mind doesn't help me appreciate a story that mixes them up. Much the same for "its" and "it's," and similar mistakes. Look at this this way, Aspiring Writer: The readers who don't know the difference between these forms won't mind if you use them right, and the readers who do, mind a lot if you use them wrong.

Obviously well-researched background always impresses me. So does dialogue or narration that's strongly in character. In Eroica manga the original wording is in Japanese. The characters' phrasing and style isn't set in English, so a strong fanfic characterization has to make sense of their actions and create a verbal style that is believable for the manga-page adventurers. I like feeling that I can recognize the characters at the end of the story as the same characters introduced at the beginning of the story, allowing for story events.

What do you struggle with when you sit down to write, and how do you overcome it?

What's the next line, or the next action in a scene, is what I have to know when I sit down. If I don't know what's happening next in the story, I have to do something else until I do know. Walking somewhere is a good way of getting a scene to work itself out, or any other exercise-with-a-view that doesn't occupy the mind too much. Another approach is to erase the last few paragraphs and see if there's another way to go in that section of the story.

Do you ever get "blocked?" How do you deal with it? Any idea what causes it?

Now and then. Sometimes the next part of the story needs to gestate for a while. Sometimes it needs re-thinking the plot or more research. Sometimes being blocked means that there's too much else going on emotionally -- a family crisis, a new job -- and the best thing to do is to work on real life until there's mental room for fiction-writing again.

What are some common mistakes that you see new writers make in your fandom?

Some writers assume that the two main Eroica characters, Major Klaus von dem Eberbach and Dorian Red Gloria (a.k.a. Eroica), are ready to fall easily into each other's arms. Perhaps it's because Dorian being openly gay makes the slash theme explicit. (This was a lot more dramatic when there was no such thing as an openly gay character on American TV, but it's still a factor.) The tension and bad temper between the two characters throughout the manga has to be part of any story that's more than a PWP.

How do you select what to read and what to feedback? Do you mainly read stories written by your friends or do you branch out a bit?

I read everything in the fandom that's finished, and longer than 5K, that I can find. I avoid "to be continued" stories if there's any chance of seeing the whole story later. I mostly send feedback to friends, since I'm not sure how others will take it.

What common mistakes do you see in your fandom in terms of characterisation?

Softening the characters to make them more lovable. Klaus is a foul-mouthed, arrogant piece of bad temper waiting to happen. Dorian shouts less but is just as adamant about getting his own way, and has no scruples about breaking any law or custom that happens to inconvenience him. They are not sweet, fluffy-bunny people.

Writing the characters to be informal in speech and manner regardless of circumstances. Both men choose to be informal (in Klaus's case, verbally abusive) quite often, but both, if their stated backgrounds can be believed and as shown in occasional moments in the manga episodes, have been raised to understand formal manners. This should be clear in social situations that require formality. If Dorian were ever introduced to Klaus's fiancee, for instance, he would call her "Fraulein," and not "Oops, hiya toots." It's even likely that Klaus would call her "Fraulein" most of the time.

A note about aristocratic titles or traditions: These are a routine trapping of the high-romance adventure genre, but stories that use Dorian's title and get it wrong, or that assume Klaus *has* a current title -- in republican Germany -- telegraph that the writer is working in Ye Oldde Vaggue, Unresearch'd Romantickal Mode, which all too often produces squishy bland stories.

What advice would you give someone who is just entering the fandom?

Study a little Japanese. Reading the whole manga in the original is quite ambitious, as it's idiomatic and topical; but knowing something of how the language works -- what the proper names look like, what forms are insulting or polite -- opens up information that is ambiguous at best in translations. (If you get interested in other manga or anime, this will pay off very quickly. Just being able to pick your title out of a list of ideograms cuts down the search time at the video store or bookstore or website.)

Also, read something about NATO and modern Europe, and then contrast it with the information given and implied about NATO, Germany, Britain, and Europe in the manga stories. Aoike Yasuko, the artist and writer, is careful about many factual details, but she is also systematically creating a spies-and-robbers fantasy in which some normal aspects of reality just don't operate. Some of these are crucial to the plots: for instance, Interpol has pictures of Eroica and publishes them widely. The Earl of Gloria is a well-known socialite. Nobody ever connects the two. Fanwriting needn't always copy the source's style of fiction exactly, but if that's a goal, the story should be a fantasy in the same way the manga is.

How would you summarize the state of writing in your fandom? Are you generally impressed with the fic you see, or does it make you want to bang your head against the wall?

Eroica fandom (in English) has always been small, and few new stories were being written for quite a while. As of the last two years or so there are more fans writing it again, producing, quite frankly, a wider range of both good and bad stories than ever before. I'm stunned at the emotional insight of the best of them, and equally stunned at the complete triviality some show.

Any other pet peeves/advice/general thoughts?

Don't make Klaus stutter along in broken English, especially when the story situation makes it likely that he's speaking German. German is his native language, and he'd speak it like, well, a native, and a fairly well-educated one at that. Indicate that with a corresponding style of English if the story is told mainly in English. He's also, according to Aoike, fluent in all European languages, so he shouldn't stumble much in English-as-English, either.

On a related topic, the Eroica characters are mostly multi-lingual, working in an inherently multi-lingual situation. Who uses what language, when, and in what idiom, can add a dimension to the story, even if it has to be indicated rather than given literally. I personally enjoy seeing enough of a non-English character's own language to get the flavor of it, even though I have only a rudimentary grasp of anything but English. By all means, have any language you don't speak well checked for accuracy -- advice I should have followed more stringently myself sometimes -- but don't be shy about using it, or at least indicating it, if your narrative calls for (say) someone too mad to think, shouting in his own language instead of that of the nation whose customs inspector just confiscated his gun.

BT's story recs:

Sylvia, "Peripetaia"
http://www.geocities.com/worldsenough/peripet.htm

Joram, "Moonlight Shadow"
http://www.slashgirl.freeserve.co.uk/moonlight.htm

Kadorienne, "Rose Vines and Wire Ropes," with sequel, "Hell and High Water"
http://www.angelfire.com/zine/loosecanon/rosevineswireropes.html
http://www.angelfire.com/zine/loosecanon/hellandhighwater.html

Fannish Butterfly, "Calamity is Virtue's Opportunity,"
http://www.trickster.org/fannishbutterfly/calamity-dis.html

In zines:
Kay Reynolds, "Angel" in _Anime House Presents 1_