mannafrancis

[mannafrancis]

Books out of print

Just to update everyone, following the closure of Casperian Books the Administration paperback and ebooks are no longer available for sale.

I'm exploring future options for them, and I'll let you know if there's any further news. In the mean time, thanks to everyone who bought a copy of any of the books.

[mannafrancis]

Are you still writing? And if so, what could we expect to see in the future? Plus I noted that you don't plan to write any more Administration books - what was your thinking on that? Not trying to convince you differently (although I loved them so!), just curious as to your perspective.

Hi!

I'm not writing at the moment, I'm afraid.

I won't say never to writing any more Administration books. I'd just need to have a new idea for a book that excited me enough to want to write it. So, you never know!

[mannafrancis]

Hey. So, I just discovered your books, and I just finished reading Mind Fuck. As a foreigner reader and a non-native English speaker, I just can’t help but being extremely curious on Mind Fuck’s title. Why did you pick that title? Do you have any big explanation for it or was just a random pun for Val Toreth’s job? Does it have any connotation I may have overlooked?

Hi! I'm so sorry that I only just found your question - I'm very rarely on Tumblr at all, and apparently failed to realise there was anything in my inbox. For four-and-a-half years. ::facepalm::

Anyway, Mind Fuck has is a triple meaning. First for being both Warrick's and Toreth's occupations, although in very different ways. Second, as a reference to their not entirely straightforward relationship. And finally, I liked the idea of hiding the identity of both whodunnit and how they dunnit right there in the title.

[mannafrancis]

Was Grimm the one who leaked about Toreth's personal life so that he would be sent out?

First of all, I'm so sorry I didn't find this until now! And secondly, yes, she was.

[mannafrancis]

I reread the Administration pretty often since I found it online almost 20 years ago and I've always been pleasantly surprised when a new story was published. I wanted to know if another book/story will be published? I've been wondering how Sara and Toreth's relationship has changed or if they'll continue working together. If Warrick and Toreth are still living together. If Warrick finds out how much Sara and Toreth have lied about their relationship. I have a lot of questions and would really like to know of we'll get more stories about them or if I should just keep imagining outcomes.

I love this series and hope to see more of it.

At the moment I don't have any plans for another Administration book, I'm afraid. I would never say never, though, so maybe one day you'll get another pleasant surprise that will answer all your questions!

[mannafrancis]

I like it!  And with a dry base, it would have to be either sex or solving crime, as Toreth doesn’t do very well with boredom.  Maybe another bored base resident decided to spice things up by playing with some illegal AI programming.  They could probably find a satisfactory way to solve their boredom together. :-)

Will there ever be an Administration story set on Mars or somewhere else not on Earth?

This has been here for months, I’m so sorry.  The answer is…maybe?  If I came up with an idea for one then it could be a lot of fun.  I’d like to do something about Dillian’s job, but the idea I have for that at the moment would probably be set on Earth.

[mannafrancis]

Thank you very much!  And I hope you’ll enjoy the extra stories.  They’re some of my favourites, especially the B-C point of view ones which were such fun to write.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited to open a delivery before 👀 @mannafrancis

[mannafrancis]

Will there ever be an Administration story set on Mars or somewhere else not on Earth?

This has been here for months, I’m so sorry.  The answer is...maybe?  If I came up with an idea for one then it could be a lot of fun.  I’d like to do something about Dillian’s job, but the idea I have for that at the moment would probably be set on Earth.

[mannafrancis]

Oh, wow!  I hope you enjoy them all. I’d feel terrible if you got halfway through and decided, nah, these aren’t so good. :-)

I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited to open a delivery before 👀 @mannafrancis

[mannafrancis]

Website update: The return of Make it a Surprise (more or less, but actually more)

Rather a long time ago, now, I took down the short story Make it a Surprise because I wanted to rework it after it was folded into Corpora Delicti.  Finally, I actually did it.  The new and much expanded version is now on the website as New Year Irresolutions.  

All the expanded content is from Corpora Delicti, so if you've already read that then I'm afraid there's nothing new.  But if you haven't, good news!  Hope you enjoy!

[mannafrancis]

Hi, I don't know if you get this question a lot but I was wondering if you were thinking of writing another book in the administration series? I've loved reading the series and how the dynamic has progressed between Torerth and Warrick and how deeply entrenched Torerth is becoming in things behind the scene in the administration. Book 9 left many things open and I would love to learn how the story progresses.

Hi!  I’m sorry I missed this, but I haven’t been on Tumblr for a bit.  I’m afraid that I don’t have any news about another book at the moment, although I would love to write more Administration at some point.  There were a lot of open plot threads at the end of Corpora Delicti, deliberately so, and I do have a few ideas for future possible stories, which definitely include more Administration shenanigans!

[mannafrancis]

Hi! Sorry, I think you were asked about this a lot, but I tried to look for answers and found nothing. Do you have a specific number of books for Administration in mind? Also, do you plan some grand fallout for Toreth and Warrick at one stage, even if a temporary one? I always wondered if Carnac's prediction (about what Toreth is offering no longer being enough for Warrick) is a foreshadowing that will have to be dealt with. Thank you for your work and your talent) I *love* your writing.

Thank you very much!  (And I’m so sorry I haven’t answered this before.)I don’t have a specific number in mind.  I thought for a while that Family Values would be the last, but then I had an idea for another one that turned out to be two.  I don’t specifically plan a grand fallout, but then I don’t really plan anything, I just write and find out where it takes me.  It if took me to a dramatic breakup, I would certainly be willing to follow along and see what happened next.

[mannafrancis]

Questions answered

@mvdnghtnx

Apologies for how long it took me to do this.  It turned out quite long so I put it behind a cut.

What was the intention while writing - is there anything you wanted to express or tell the readers specifically? (Like was your main focus entertaining readers. Did you want to write the story mostly for yourself, etc.?

Was there any special occasion for which you wrote the Administration? (Was it a present for a friend/yourself/did you want to just write it because it was an idea in your head and you wanted to write it down?)

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, someone I knew on a Blakes 7 mailing list asked for submissions for a non-erotica mixed zine (meaning het, slash or gen were all accepted, but no PWPs).  I wrote a gen story called Sweepstake, set before the Blakes episode The Way Back, which included an OC interrogator character -- Toreth.  The zine never came out, but my beta absolutely loved Toreth and so I wrote her another story with him, this time slash, which eventually became the opening chapters of Mind Fuck.  It's on the Mannazone as a taster called Virtual, although that has been significantly edited from the first version.  After that she still wanted more, so I wrote part of Pancakes and then few of the other short stories.

By this time a handful of other people from the mailing list were also reading the stories, which were getting increasingly divorced from the Blakes 7 setting and increasingly full of OCs.  I thought about putting them online, or even in a zine, but I felt almost like I was tricking people into reading it by still calling it Blakes, even an AU.  At that point Avon had become, to put it kindly, somewhat out of character.  So I swapped over completely into the mindset of it being a different setting and went with it, without worrying too much whether anyone other than my beta would want to go with me.

When I decided to put the stories online, though, I knew that the timeline jump from Virtual to Pancakes was too big.  It was okay when it was being written for me and my beta, and shared with a few other people, because I could just handwave over the gaps for them.  But if anyone else did ever read them -- remember that back then online original m/m wasn't so much of a thing, so I didn't have much in the way of expectations of an audience -- then coming to it cold there had to be some kind of relationship development.  So after quite a few of the other stories had been written, I had to go back to the beginning and try to fill in the rest.  (I have a list somewhere of the whole writing order, if you're interested.)

Incidentally, I hate writing to a plan, even as nebulous a plan as the end point of 'these two characters will continue to see one another afterwards'.  Toreth really doesn't want to do that kind of thing, and Warrick mostly cares about SimTech.  Writing Mind Fuck felt like having to constantly make course corrections to ensure we were heading the right way, trying to hit a tiny island in the middle of the ocean.  They needed to be forced together for long enough to have something develop, hence the SimTech murder plot that keeps them in contact.  Professionally, it's pretty easy to make them respect one another, and the hot sex does the rest of the heavy lifting.  But anyway, from an authorial intent POV, the entire purpose of Mind Fuck is to leave Toreth and Warrick in a place where they will continue to have no-strings-attached sex once a week.  Yes, I aim high! :-)

Incidentally, filling in relationship development is also why I wrote Quid Pro Quo for the paperbacks.  I wanted more between Mind Fuck and Pancakes, to make the join smoother.  (I also wanted to write more Chris Doyle.  I'd had the scene where he talks to Toreth at the end of the case written for ages, and I wanted a home for it in the timeline.)

Was there an intention of showing readers a dystopian world while still focusing on the ‘normal’ part of life? Did you want to make the readers think about something specifically?)

The dedication at the front of Terry Pratchett's Guards, Guards reads: 'They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.'  

The Administration's faceless minions maybe don't get to be quite so heroic, but they do get to be minions with faces, doing their minion thing.  I've always loved minor characters, especially the bad guys.  I love to imagine the lives they're leading in the background of stories and movies.  Blakes 7 has some great episodes that include the point of view of the cogs in the machine.

And did anything happened around the time you wrote book 1 (I assume 2002 and a few years before that), that influenced your writing or your intention? You’ve said before that a quote from Blake 7 was the inspiration for the series, was there anything else?

Not really.  Although depressing dystopias are a fine British tradition.  I guess it was inevitably influenced by the ongoing development of the post-9/11 War on Terror world, though.  I remember being very jealous of the name Department of Homeland Security and wishing that I'd thought of it first.

You said on your homepage that readers can expect original fiction following the stylistic traditions of slash fanfiction - was that an intentional decision on your part that you decided to write in this style, was it what felt most fitting; what was your reason behind choosing a style that is typically related to fanfiction and not often found in books (as I feel it is a kind of controversial style choice in the world of literature)?

Coming from a fanfic background, that's just how I write.  It's more of a warning to potential readers, to help them judge whether they'll enjoy the stories than a statement of intent.

[mannafrancis]

I don’t usually do this, because I fucked up when I wrote the story and that’s all on me, so explanations after the fact are tacky.  But, be that as it may.  The Founding Fathers Amendment is meant to be a constitutional amendment that was made in the future, relative to our now.  I tried to eyeball a timeline to give it a number, but amendments to the Constitution are really irregularly spaced, so I chickened out and gave it a nickname, like the second amendment is usually referred to as ‘the right to bear arms’.  The nicknames refers to the Amendment supposedly ‘restoring’ what the original founding fathers must ‘really’ have wanted before all that Bill of Rights nonsense.  It’s not supposed to be creating new founding fathers.

Somehow this made sense when I wrote it, and while I side-eyed it a few times in editing I persuaded myself it did actually make my intent clear.  Obviously I was wrong, though.

(The character names are just made up.  I think Grant might have been a moment of Blakes 7 nostalgia, but I don’t really remember)

(*) From the interview with Mayhew at the hotel, Leahlynn Grant seems to be meant to be contemporary with us. Do you recognize the name? Autumn Tansey-Child seems to be meant to have lived later than us, but should I recognize the name anyway, or parts of it?

I think that part is entirely made up, much like the war that changed Europe. The entire series has, as its foundation, possible (if not probable) political changes.

Some of these changes rely on extreme circumstances (nuclear war), some don’t (crawling erosion of human rights).

Also, it’s worldbuilding. Some of it seems extremely unlikely to me (redefining who is known as “founding fathers” in the US), to be honest.

If we accept the world or the Administration series, we accept these changes happened, and I’m not sure how important it is to know the precise way they did - oftentimes a name is a shorthand for a major political/social change. (eg MLK instead of civil rights era/movement, or Thatcherism/Reaganism instead of a long list of economy & social changes, their reasons & results).

[mannafrancis]

The advantage of never deleting old email is that it’s a decent substitute for my terrible memory.

In November 2002 I posted to a mailing list about the Mannazone going live and also got the first feedback for Administration stories.  I don’t think that I’ve ever taken them down, bar the hosting site itself having occasional problems.

Does anyone remember when Mind Fuck was originally put online? Right now it says it was last updated 28-10-2007 but that’s when the books came out so it must have been put online (and taken down for a while?) before that but I can’t seem to find any information on that

[mannafrancis]

I’ll thank you on his behalf.  Weirdly, he and I share a birthday.  Wacky coincidence, huh?

(@tehanulilac I don’t know it’s in the series but this is something I actually wrote down and can find.  Toreth’s birthday is the 10th July, and Sara’s in the 2nd April.  Dillian’s in the 3rd August.)

Warrick’s birthday is coming on May 2nd.

Apparently. Family Values: “I suggest we move on the thirtieth of April, if that’s acceptable.” And later “ The movers had been booked for yesterday” and, on the same day, “ Tomorrow for sure, since, as Sara had reminded him again before she left, it was Warrick’s birthday.”

Is there a date for Toreth more precise than “early July”? Sara’s is some time in spring too.

[mannafrancis]

The saying Kel’s referring to is ‘[Person] couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery’, meaning that they’re incompetent.

Please help me understand in detail the place towards the end of FAtW where Kel says, "You lot need an admin. What's the saying about parties in alcoholic establishments? Names and drinks in order, please, my dears." What IS the saying?

TBH I have zero clue what saying Kel refers to. Maybe someone else knows?