An interview with postmodernist author, aardvark Smoke N'mirrors.

Say, didn't you used to be called Ethel?

Oh yes - my first 'fursona' - not that I knew that was what I was creating - was Ethel The-Aardvark, an obvious and rather lame Monty Python reference. Ethel was a middle aged, overweight, smoking, drinking, anything-for-a-laugh raucous old thing, rather like the aardvark embodiment of the elderly Iris Windthyme from Paul Magrs' books. However, the beauty of personas is that they can change over time, and Ethel has been evolving quite rapidly of late, so here I am - younger, not quite so overweight, and hopefully still do-anything-for-a-laugh.

But you're still an aardvark?

Yes - why not? If one is going to go to the trouble to become a completely new creature, why be a fox or a dog like everyone else?

You've assigned yourself a genre - postmodernist - in a way not many fanfic writers do...

Yes, because I think it's only fair to warn readers what they're getting themselves in for. There is no real consistency between my stories - in fact, my various Dangermouse works all contradict each other completely - and they're quite different from the main body of fanfic out there. I don't do the long, meticulously planned epics of storytelling and characterisation because 1. I don't do that so well and 2. everyone else is doing it anyway. I specialise in little vingnettes, often taking a bizzare little idea (what if a food fight broke out in Kitchen Stadium? What if Dangermouse and Greenback used to be partners?) and writing just enough prose to hang the idea from.

So, you're too lazy to write a proper story then?

I wouldn't say lazy, but there is a degree (a rather large degree) of couldn't-be-botheredness. Like I said, the realist epic market is rather well catered for already, so rather than complete with that I'm having much more fun doing my own thing. Postmodernism - where you embrace the story as a constructed thing, not as a written representation of some sort of reality which has to make some sort of sense, brings a great deal of freedom.

You're an arts student, aren't you, you pretentious thing?

Graduate, actually, with honours. But actually I didn't start applying postmodernism to my own writing until quite recently. At uni I had to read a great many postmodernist works which took themselves very seriously and were neither witty nor fun. At the same time in the world of fanfic, Lawrence Miles' ghastly books were doing to Doctor Who what Charles Manson did to Roman Polanski's missus. It wasn't I 'met' Paul Magrs, and his good lady Iris Wildthyme, that I realised how a witty, clever, postmodernist fanfic could work, could still be readable to those with better things to do than get literature degrees, and importantly could still be respectful of the original canon.

So, what next?

Wello, I have a half-written Iron Chef piece that really needs an end, and a few more Dangermouse ideas that need a little more gestation time before they come to anything. Other than that, I'm not sure. INspiration (and obsession) will strike when they will...