An Evening with RARI, BG Fanfic Writer
by Giles Fan


“I will leave a key for you so you can get in,” the email read.  “Feel free to poke around.  I don't have any deep dark secrets.  Well, I do, but you know them all.” 

Yes, I already knew her secret:  she was a fanfic writer.  She wrote smut.  She even wrote slash.  These were things that might keep her from being elected to public office, but they were the very reason I was coming to Sacramento.  I was a groupie--I loved that fanfic and adored the smut and slash!

A huge fan of her work, I believe that Rari is definitely one of the top BG fanfic writers around.  (My deep desire to keep up my friendship with all of those writers prevents me from ranking them specifically!)  As with the other writers I most admire, I find her work to be exceptionally well written, and I wanted to meet this talent.  The more we spoke, the more I realized that not only was this woman incredibly talented, she was incredibly dedicated, sweating tears and blood over her stories and her characters.  Her success rests greatly on the old formula, "20% inspiration, 80% perspiration."

I so enjoyed our evening together that I asked Rari if I could post the story for others to share.  After all, we all knew her big secret already--why not get to know her a bit better?  She kindly agreed so here are some of the dark secrets of Rari...

Rari says that she was an instinctive shipper for years before she discovered the extensive online communities devoted to fanficing their favorite ship. 

“I used to create stories in my head about the characters I loved all the time. I had no problem on trips, I could just sit in the airport for hours, daydreaming new adventures. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I stumbled across some fan fiction and realized that other people were doing the same. And I thought, ‘hey, I do  that,’ and I started writing. And now I am totally addicted to both reading and writing fanfic. It’s a wonderful world.”

Rari takes her craft seriously and is determined to get the details right. For an upcoming Star Trek piece, she decided that she wanted to use one character to use pirate-related nicknames for other characters and spent days reading up on pirates and picking names that would be suitable. She’s studied ancient history to get a spell right for a Buffy piece and even has one “beta” devoted solely to “getting the English right for Giles and the other Brits.”

And her British beta is just one of four she uses, each serving a different purpose. Rari describes one of her betas as “brutal, absolutely brutal. But I need that. The stories come back with red marks all over them and I curl up in my pajamas with hot chocolate in hand and just cry.” She sighed. “I told my beta that once and now she sends me a warning when the story comes back: ‘three cups of chocolate needed for this one!’ But my stories are always better for her criticism.”

“I have another beta that helps me with the creative process and another who is just super on continuity. She catches every little thing like, ‘how can you have them stand up here, when they stood up three paragraphs back.’ I hate getting back the criticism, but I love my beta’s and I can’t do this without them.”

I complimented her on the little touches in her pieces, how so many of them struck me as “just right,” matching perfectly what I could see the character doing or saying. I noted one in particular, saying, “I remember when you had Giles go find rain, it seemed so right.”

Rari leaped up in enthusiasm, “Yes, that’s it., that’s just what he needed. But it took me days to figure that out. I spent three days pacing this apartment, 2 or 3 hours a night, thinking, ‘what does Giles need?, what does Giles need?’”  She started pacing to demonstrate, waving a small pillow around in time with the mantra, “what does Giles need?” 

“And then it came to me, ‘he needs rain’ and I ran into my computer and the rest of the story just poured out.  It was right, but it took me three days to figure that out.”

That was exceptionally tough, trying to figure out that one moment.  But often Rari says that she doesn’t write the story as much as it writes itself.  She says, “I can’t always control my muse.  Sometimes I start a story and it goes off somewhere completely on its own. I sometimes try to stop it, try to bring it back to what I wanted it to be, but that never seems to work.  The stories are there, the characters are there, and I usually just have to let them come out in the way they insist on coming.”

The characters are all consuming for her. She will watch and rewatch single clips of favored key scenes from shows that she sees as turning points or representative of the ship she favors. She pulled out immediately a clip from the Star Trek episode, “Shore Leave.” “Look, look at that, now tell me that isn’t just SO shippy!” She laughed and said, “let’s watch it again.”  We did and she grinned at me.  “My other friends think I’m crazy.  I make them watch this or other clips and I yell at the TV and they just think I’m nuts.  But its fun.  And I mean really, look at that.  Wasn’t it just a perfect KS shippy moment?”

The enthusiasm was contagious.  We began to compare favorite moments in other the BG ship world. “Oh, The Prom!” exclaimed Rari. “I mean he was so going to ask her to dance. It was just so obvious. Damn Angel, damn him. I’m going to have to stake him soon in one of my fics.”

Yes, staking Angel will happen at some future point in the ‘Roger & Paul Universe.’ But as much as Rari is eager to see Angel turn to dust, she’s committed to making it as easy on her beloved characters as possible.  “I can’t have Buffy or Giles do it, or really any of the gang.  Even if Angel deserves it, it would put too much pressure on their relationships.  Buffy’s over Angel, but still, it will be tough for her to see him staked.  So I need to have someone else do it, so it doesn’t scar the key relationships.”  (She told me who, but I won’t tell you!)

We talked about her introducing other characters, like Roger and Paul, to the Buffyverse and why they seem to become so popular as their own individuals. “I think its because they all revolve around Giles,” she said. “I mean he’s the character that I just keyed in on from the start. So all my new characters revolve around him.  Often their job is simply to praise him or say something about him that doesn’t get said in canon or that modesty would prevent him from saying himself. My stories are always about Giles and those around him, not about the new character with Giles on the side.”

“My obsession isn't with Tony Head, the actor, but with Rupert Giles, the character.  I mean I think he’s a great actor and I know that Rupert Giles wouldn’t be half as interesting to me if someone else played him.  He’s gorgeous of course, and he really brought Giles to life.  But its Giles that fascinates me.  I don’t need Tony’s autograph.  But if he was in tweed and signing autographs as ‘Rupert Giles,’ I’d be running people over to get one!”

Rari is often working on 2 to 6 stories at one time, not always in the same universe.  Some of her stories will take months to write, and of course the beta process can be time consuming. She says that some of her stories have been rewritten a dozen times. “Once,” she said, “I deleted a section that I didn’t like, and two weeks later I knew I had to have it back. But it was gone, I hadn’t saved it.  So I started writing again and it all just came rushing back and it was almost identical to what I had before. I knew it was right then, that it was what the story needed.”

“Sometimes Gileswench and I will start emailing scenes back and forth.  We once created some great smut that way, with me writing a section and emailing it to her and her editing and adding on and sending it back.  We were both in hysterics at the whole process, and,” she said with an evil grin, “probably a little hot too! All those ‘flowing juices,’ you know…”

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