Fan Fiction Crossovers

One of my goals for 2011 was to finish all three of the fanfiction crossovers that were Works In Progress on January 1st. It’s looking like I might actually accomplish that goal! I’ve got one that’s still incomplete, but the plot is clearly winding up, (and leaving open the possibility of a sequel.)

To me, writing a crossover can be the ultimate fanfic high – not just playing with somebody else’s characters and telling your own story with them, but trying to find a way to make two different fandoms work together for more than twice the fun, and finding the common ground between them.

The first crossover I finished this year was ‘A Roswellian Alien in Metropolis’, and it was already nearly finished in December – 3 chapters out of four. This was a sequel to a Roswell/Smallville crossover that I wrote because of a challenge. The first story in the series, ‘Arrow through my soul’, involved Maria DeLuca going to Metropolis for a record deal and falling in love with Oliver Queen/Green Arrow.

By the time I finished that one, I’d already thought that there could be a sequel involving Michael going to Metropolis as well, and then I got the idea of Chloe trying to train Michael to become part of the Justice League. That gave me my opening scene, but it was actually when Chloe sent Lana Lang to keep tabs on Michael that the story really hit high gear. Somehow Michael and Lana have chemistry on the page. Who knew?

And that’s part of the fun of crossovers, of course, seeing how the different characters will relate to each other. Roswell and Smallville have very similar canons and mythologies, of course – both teen soaps originally from the WB network, featuring extraterrestrial teenagers hiding their abilities. It wasn’t hard to picture the two sets of characters, some in New Mexico and the others in Kansas, unaware of what was going on in the next state over.

Both of these stories have followed the pattern of a protagonist character from Roswell (in first person narration,) entering the world of Smallville and meeting many of that show’s characters, and facing a challenge from a Smallville antagonist. I’m still considering a third story in the series, which would play with that convention a little, and have Clark come to Roswell and meet with Max, Liz, Michael and some of the others.

Fanart banner: A Roswell Alien in Metropolis

It’s been a while since I shared any of my fanart here on the blog, partly because it’s been a while since I’ve done any new fanart, but I want to get some blogs done this month, and I like the first enough to share it more or less right away.

This is a story banner, a kind of ‘Movie poster’ for a crossover that I wrote last year, second in my Roswell/Smallville crossover series. I was able to get a DVD screencap of Brendan Fehr as Michael Guerin from the season 3 DVDs, in fact that’s from the series finale, since I wanted Michael to look as mature as possible, but the only Smallville DVDs I own are the season 1 box set, while this story is set in season eight.

Luckily, I was able to find some good screen captures at tvscreencaps.com, though that was different from my normal process in a lot of ways. The pictures are smaller and lower-resolution than my usual DVD captures, there aren’t as many pictures for a given scene or sequence, and because they were captured off a broadcast instead of a DVD, there’s a CW logo on the bottom of most of the images, towards the right side of the screen. So, to avoid messing up the picture, I ended up gravitating towards captures where the person I wanted to include was on the left side of the screen.

I like the way this came out, with the big high-res picture of Michael on the left of the banner, little inserts of Chloe Sullivan and Davis Bloome in the top right, and Kristen Kreuk as Lana Lang in the bottom right. And I do like that text – something that hints at the complications in the plot without spoiling them is always good.

Final Polaris round-up.

Okay, my sleep schedule’s a little wonky at the moment, work stuff kept me up last night, but I’ll share some of my favorite moments from Sunday at Polaris 25, after I signed off from yesterday.

The writing workshop with Julie Czerneda was really cool – it was oriented for beginners, but I learned some cool stuff – working in groups to come up with science-based ideas, develop them, and then start to add in protagonists, settings, emotional reactions for the reader, and figure out how to explain the science to the reader. I also thought it was interesting that she didn’t see much value in writers critiquing other writers.

The meeting with the other writers from Ad Astra was nice – hi guys, if any of you are dropping by to catch up on my blog!

And then, there was the Jewel Staite stuff – she had a fun Q&A, didn’t want anybody recording video or sound so that she could ‘trash talk’ without fear of it coming out to haunt her. I actually asked four questions:

• What were you thinking of when filming the strawberry scene? (She said that she had cheeseburgers on the brain when Joss told her to imagine it was the tastiest thing ever – and that he really loved the very first take she did.)
• What was your favorite outfit of Kaylee’s? ‘Not the birthday cake dress!’
• Favorite episode of firefly? ‘I really loved filming The Message, even though we’d found out we were cancelled by then, because we decided to have a great time and make as much fun for ourselves as we could.’
• If Firefly came back, what would you like to have happen next in Kaylee’s life? ‘I’d love to see her and Simon have a baby together, I think Kaylee would be a really great mom.’

And I got a picture signed, and also had her sign the ‘Those Left Behind’ comic book, which is starting to accumulate nearly as many Big Damn Signatures as the Firefly Blueprints Book.

After going through the signature room again, in only 20 minutes or so, I hit a few panels, covering Starship captains and Smallville season ten, (which I haven’t finished watching, and got spoiled on a few details, but what the heck?) Then it was time for the Geek-off Championships, where I scored a single point, which meant I was in a four-way tie for fourth place or something like that.

Then my brother had arrived to drive me home, and I drove half-way myself, along Lakeshore road from Oakville through Burlington, and then across the Burlington lift bridge.

Fanart flashback #12: Coming full circle.

Fanart flashbacks index

Well, the day has come – I’m ending the fanart flashback tuesdays series here, and sharing two of the earliest fan wallpapers I ever made. These were from back in the fall of 2003, which was probably before I’d even heard of fanfic banners – though I’m not sure, because I was at Fanatics by then. Maybe I’d seen some but never really paid attention.

This first one is a fairly simple wallpaper for Smallville – almost a generic cover banner for the entire show, rather than trying to encapsulate a more specific message:

Fanart flashbacks #11: The art of arranging

Fanart flashbacks index

I know I mentioned two weeks ago that in my next Fanart flashback, I’d be wrapping the series up with some of my earliest wallpapers, but then I decided to extend it one week, and wrap up with #12. This time, I’ll share a bunch of fanfiction banners, and talk about the different ways of actually arranging different video capture elements onto the banner canvas, since I kind of glossed over that before, and I was thinking about it as I struggled over my latest banner last weekend.

There’s no one pattern of arrangement that will work for every banner; it depends on what size and shape banner you want to end up with, (which depends on where you want to show it,) and what you want to include from the video captures.

Fanart 10: Lots of small wallpapers.

Fanart series index.

Well, I think I’m going to be wrapping up this fan art series soon, though I might still share some from time to time. This week, though, I’ve got a lot of recent examples of what I call ‘wallpaper’ fanart as opposed to story banners or signature banners – fanart that’s just supposed to be pretty and possibly illustrate a moment or theme from the fandom show. I did quite a bit of that in 2010, though I’ll probably be moving back to more story banners this year.

So I’ve got six little wallpapers to show, each from a different favorite TV show. First, from Roswell, a Michael/Maria shipper banner, drawing from two early season one episodes when those characters were just starting to relate to each other:

In this case, as is usual for my wallpaper, I thought of the theme and the copy first, and then went looking for vidcaps that would suit it – from two different sequences involving Michael, Maria, and a motel room.

Switching POV and voice.

I started a new fanfic crossover piece in late June, and started working on Chapter Two early in August, after JulNoWriMo was over. This story, ‘A New Mexican Alien in Metropolis,’ is Smallville/Roswell fandoms, and a sequel to a charity auction challenge story that I did last fall, ‘Arrow through my soul.’

For a while, the new story was going great – Michael Guerin had come to Metropolis to start a fight with Oliver Queen, but Oliver wasn’t available, so I was introducing him to Chloe Sullivan, (who he kind of grudgingly tolerated,) Davis Bloom, (who he almost got in a fist-fight with, and then bonded over the graveyard shift life with,) and last of all Lana Lang, and sparks definitely started to fly between Michael and Lana, with much flirting and witty banter going on without my feeling like I had to work at it at all…

Until the dinner at the Italian restaurant started to bog down in sharing of canon trivia between their two universes, so desperately I tried to shift ahead suddenly to a scene with the two of them breaking into Maria’s Metropolis apartment… and that scene absolutely stalled. Sigh.

I switched to another project for a few days, and yesterday it occurred to me that maybe one of the problems with ‘Metropolis’ was that I was writing it in third person, generally following Michael’s perceptions. ‘Arrow’ had been first person POV, with Maria narrating as she travelled into the worlds of Metropolis and Smallville, Kansas, and I think that worked well. So today on the bus I started going through what I’d written for ‘Metropolis’ and changing “Michael” and “he” to “I”, “they” to “us”, and all other pronouns as necessary to make it first person.

In the process, I noticed some interesting things happening, that other changes in wording and phrasing were coming up, because the words that I’d initially used weren’t the ones that Michael would use. (That’s one benefit of writing in a fandom that I’m so familiar with, that the character voices are so natural without my having to come up with them.)

I also ran into a bit of trouble with the very first scene of chapter one, because that was NOT third person limited POV of Michael Guerin. The story actually opens in third person limited POV of Chloe Sullivan, how she runs into this agitated guy outside Oliver Queen’s office, (who turns out to be Michael,) and calms him down a bit. So I suppose I’m going to have to rewrite that one scene much more seriously to get it into Michael’s narration.
Wish me luck with that!