The first draft manuscript of my "Swedish story" is now complete at circa 120,000 words, after 826 days of working on it. As to when, if ever, it will be typed up and ready to publish, I can't say...

My C2 community Rescue Raoul! showcases Raoul-related fic harvested from across the last fifteen years on FFnet: fluffy, morbid or epic-length, I've tried to cover the whole range of in-character stories.

Currently I'm working on a translation of the German story Gefangene der Angst by E.M.K.81.

My name is Igenlode -- it's three syllables, "Igen-" as in eigenvector (for the mathematically-minded among you -- otherwise, it's the "ai" diphthong followed by a hard "g") and "-lode" as in "motherlode", and stressed as the latter. No, it doesn't mean anything; it's just a name... I have a blog which tends to get updated spasmodically (generally when I have no other outlet, e.g. exchange of emails, for my ramblings) and which generally sees the earliest uploads of my stories, along with slightly more author's-notes-type discussion about them than I use here: h t t p s: //

I originally discovered fanfiction in the late 1990s and had a number of stories published in "Blake's 7" zine format. (In actual print, that is, which we actually had to pay to buy...) What I was looking for at the time was 'further adventures' of the characters, in the spirit of the commercial "Star Trek" or "Doctor Who" novels, so I was rather taken aback to discover that fanfic consisted largely of emotional rehashes of the characters' onscreen relationships: however, I learned that I had a knack for writing convincing 'darkfic' in which the characters suffer betrayals, terrible mistakes and irreconcilable clashes of loyalty, and that in the world of "Blake's 7" this sort of thing fitted right in with canon! (I've always had something of a canon obsession; one good thing about the final episode of the series having been broadcast long before I ever encountered it was that at least canon couldn't change retrospectively under you, as would happen to my later fiction...)

My first online fandom took place courtesy of the IMDb discussion boards, where I became involved after the release of the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" film: as a fan of oldfashioned adventure stories I was extremely excited to experience a real riproaring swashbuckler again, although typically it was the conflicts of loyalty within the film that sparked off my writing instincts, and the character of Norrington with whom I actually identified the most. It was at this point that I discovered the existence of fanfiction.net: my original account (to which I have lost the password) with the stories attached to it is still located at http://www.fanfiction.ws/u/701934/Igenlode, and features my first attempt at a consciously AU fiction ("Live for Me", exploring the aftermath of Jack Sparrow's execution). "A Fine Woman", never intended as AU but thoroughly invalidated by the film's sequel, set up a confrontation between Norrington and a happily-married Elizabeth which attempted to be fair to both sides: it's very much a 'classic' Igenlode fiction and one of my most successful attempts at handling my favourite themes of loyalty and unrequited affections. "Seldom What They Seem" was my attempt at writing a swashbuckling Caribbean romp of my own, with a certain amount of input from Sid Meier's 8-bit "Pirates!" game: sadly it was never quite as good as the angst-ridden character pieces.

My other online fandom was the "Harry Potter" community on Usenet ('newsgroups' -- remember those?), where we would analyse each book in minute detail as it came out and speculate endlessly on the motives of the characters and Whether Snape Was Evil: I was always on the not-evil side (and was of course ultimately proved correct!) but got frustrated by authors' attempts to write a fluffy, redeemed Snape. The appeal of the character, to me, lay in his dark side, with which my own misanthropic tendencies could fully identify, and I wrote "Water-horse" in an attempt to create a Snape who was both consistent with canon (i.e. deeply unpleasant) and yet an understandable protagonist. "Through Older Eyes" was my response to the infamous events of the Astronomy Tower, which really got remarkably close to the final 'truth' :-)

With the publication of the final Harry Potter novel, the old discussions on Usenet and at the Sugar Quill site (where I was for a time an official beta-reader) died away, and I ended up inspired by the love-triangle in a silent gangster film, "The Way of the Strong" -- producing possibly some of the most obscure fanfic ever conceived (and archived only in email...)

After a long break I was advised in the spring of 2013 to return to writing -- or at least to uploading my considerable fiction backlog -- in the hopes of improving my frame of mind. I was very sceptical about this... but apparently it has worked. At any rate, I ended up writing five new stories in the course of that year and in consequence have felt much more buoyant (the same, alas, cannot be said for my characters, who are as darkly tormented as ever!)

My most recent fandom is an unexpected encounter with "The Phantom of the Opera", sparked off by a freebie newspaper cover disc which included five tracks each from Lloyd Webber's "Phantom" and "Love Never Dies". And, looking at my fiction output, it seems to be about time I 'came clean'... apparently so far as the "Phantom" fandom goes, I'm a Defender of Raoul. A disconcertingly rare phenomenon, I discover, but I don't seem to be inspired to write anything else.

Raoul de Chagny gets an awful lot of hate simply for existing (and hence blocking the One True Pairing dear to so many fans' hearts, via the inconvenient fact that he is engaged to/married to the heroine: unfortunately it's canon), which means that almost every Phantom story has to start off by disposing of Raoul -- either by turning him into an out-of-character monster whom no-one could defend, or simply by killing him off. It gets a bit wearing after a while.

The response of my subconscious is to come up with a string of stories that centre around Raoul's own viewpoint; which is, incidentally, a nice simple one to write, as he's human, he's normal, and his faults are easy to encompass. In the process I seem to have created an entire new genre of fiction for "Love Never Dies" -- provisionally dubbed the 'Rescue Raoul' tendency -- that fails to feature the Phantom at all!

Meanwhile I might try my hand at a Manifesto of Raoul...

- Raoul is a person, not an obstacle to be disposed of.

- Raoul is human. He is entitled to make mistakes like anybody else. This includes being jealous, being impatient, losing his temper and being afraid -- none of these are mortal sins for the rest of the world, and they don't imply complete moral delinquency on his part.

- Conversely, Raoul is normally a polite and likeable type, when not under severe stress/provocation.

- Leroux's Raoul is not a wimpy crybaby: he is an adolescent (about fourteen, in our precocious modern equivalent) suffering agonies of jealousy in the throes of first love. (And he still manages to shoot -- and hit -- the Phantom when the latter tries to creep up on him in bed.)

- Raoul loves Christine -- enough to sacrifice himself for her happiness. It's canon, even in "Love Never Dies"...

- Raoul is not a fop. Sir Percy Blakeney is a fop: Raoul is a perfectly ordinary young man who pays no attention to his clothes unless actually necessary. Referring to him as 'the fop' implies that the writer is simply copying hundreds of other fangirls without having the slightest idea what the term actually means...

The original of the story 'Please Pretend' was written in French by Chamidontrachiva: I am hosting the translation here on my own account.