FICTION: Crossing Lines & When

The line between friends and lovers can be a difficult one to cross, especially when there are other unresolved issues…

I had to look this up; I admit it... I couldn't recall when Fight the Future was released. Apparently it was June of 1998; the video came out in mid-October. So apparently after watching it a couple of times at the theatre, I was actually "inspired" enough to write an honest-to-God fan fiction piece, CROSSING LINES.

My first encounter with X-Files fanfic was in December of 1997, sixteen years ago almost to the day. It was a tale of what might have happened (on a personal level) between Mulder and Scully after the events of Paper Clip. After that first story, I did some extended reading over the next several weeks, but I never became a rabid reader of fanfic. And as it turned out, once I dove into the writing end of things, I basically stopped reading altogether.

I never planned to write fanfic (does anyone?) but rather fell into it. The thing was, I was so dissatisfied with the movie that I had to "say something". I especially found the big moment in the hallway to be bothersome, as my inner voice convinced me that Chris Carter and his cohorts were simply not going to be up to the job of highlighting it as a life-changing event for his two characters, which it was.

Although I had been a "prolific" little writer as a child (I routinely wrote ten and twenty page stories about pre-teen angst while my peers were still struggling to compose three pages about their adventures with Huey, Dewey and Louie — no joke) I pretty much fell out of that creative habit after my high school years. So it was a surprise that this story essentially tumbled out of me, after so many years of being out of practice.

From a small seed of an idea about how Mulder and Scully might address their hallway encounter, CROSSING LINES came to be reality in about three weeks, completed in October of 1998. For a variety of reasons, I didn't release it anywhere until March of 1999. (Caving to reader feedback demanding a sequel, I turned out WHEN in September of 1999 after struggling with it for quite some time.)

It had been my feeling from watching S5 that something was amiss between Mulder and Scully as the season wore on. Logistically, the show had been challenged by having to complete the movie that year, so out of practical necessity, our favourite agents were apart quite a bit. But I found that, even when they were together, they had developed a "testiness" towards one another that needed to be explained, if not resolved. Some of the feedback that I received from readers was gratifying in recognizing that aspect of the story.

And of course, when The Beginning showed up on my screen in November, it made me want to tear my hair out...