I am slapping this message up the queue because: it what, thank you so much for telling me. Christmas on the beach!!! I don’t deserve this, having once written the worst Yuletide story of all time, but I’ll take it to the bank

I can’t read any Gideon fanfic and I’ve never hurt over anything so bad in all my life. I don’t go looking at anything, even fanart, because I want my soul to be a pure chalice until I finish Alecto the Ninth, a story that’s oceans dumber than any you guys are writing.

As a note in case it wasn’t obvious, I’m so grateful that there’s any fanfiction out there. I’m so delighted. Go with my blessing. I only get hints of fandom when my friends email me shitposts (which are all perfection) or it’s my pals perpetrating it by making Gideon in their dollmaker and then refusing to show me because she ‘looked like Neo from the Matrix’, or whoever the very beautiful lovely person was at London ComicCon who got me to sign an extremely boss piece of art I still want to find online, or the funny fan in the badass cosplay who despite my charmless bewilderment who told me hi from the Discord (I’m just terrible in person and everyone is always so gentle, crackly bone hugs for the Discord). 

The last fannish joy I had was when K.M. Szpara (NOTE TO ANYONE READING THIS: BUY & READ DOCILE THEN WRITE A BUNCH OF FIC I CAN ACTUALLY READ) revealed that he thought the only viable m/m ship was Palamedes/Naberius. My editor was nodding thoughtfully. A beautiful moment.

Not at all, I’ve admitted this to crowds of nonplussed people! I’m pretty open about the fact that I wrote in Homestuck fandom as urbanAnchorite, and I am not ashamed of anything I did there except for the time I tried to convince Monster of Elendhaven author Jennifer Giesbrecht to do a story with me where Jade was having Nepeta and Equius’ baby.

I have written elsewhere on the Internet and my very old stuff is still out there on fanfiction.net, but it was all just me doing unbelievably earnest Final Fantasy epics. I’m not precisely ashamed, but my brother still calls me up and quotes choice lines from it to me.

I’m a fandom knucklehead from old times and I am very glad we currently live in the age where you can be open about it. I remember in the early 2000s it was absolutely fucking verboten to mention you’d ever written any of it in case you got sued within an inch of your life, or if people didn’t take you seriously as an artist. I realised the other day that I’d actually read and adored some of N.K. Jemisin’s fanfiction when I was younger, and I welled up with all manner of emotions.

No. You’re a bottle of Janola Power Clean.

Oh, my God, I am damned if I can remember either. I just looked and I can’t find it. I re-took the test with my students last year when we all took the Myers-Briggs together and I think got INFJ, but I’m not sure that’s quite correct because the last thing I advocated really heavily for was to “stop cooking”, so pT and I have been living off ‘fancy sandwiches’ for the past week and that doesn’t sound very INFJ.

I’m no good at these, I always distrust myself wildly when answering and no Sorting Hat test has ever sorted me into anything other than Slytherin, which drives me demented every single time. Then again, I want an answer it cannot give me (”You are a perfectly ordinary Muggle whose greatest concern in life is organising your Tegan & Sara albums”)

This is enormously charming and I’m really delighted – I hope that Gideon the Ninth lives up to the promise of the listing and that you squeeze all enjoyment you can from its pages – but what is best about this is your profile picture and name, because now I am imagining Geralt of Rivia is really enjoying his internship buying cool new titles for his library. Bartender, he has witched long! Pass him the latest in speculative literature

(Hope your internship is rad! Man, it’s really cool to think that people will be able to take Gideon the Ninth out of a library. My mum is a librarian, and for a long time I worked as a library assistant, a career I had to give up because I can’t bear the touch of paper.)

I am so glad that my twenty-three years’ revenge on my brother for daring to speak anything but golden encomiums of my work made someone happy. Thinking about Animorphs fanfic still has the power to make me happy, to be honest. The series was so good. Early fandom was so good. I was reading it back in 1997 and 1998, and following the series as the books actually dropped (when The Pretender dropped we all went absolutely out of our tiny little minds) was something I will keep with me for ever.

Unfortunately my brother reminded me just the other day over email about a fanfiction I wrote when I was eleven, about the cast of Gargoyles dying slowly and painfully after a nuclear blast. “I’ve been thinking about it after watching videos about Chernobyl and it wouldn’t have worked. They would have healed radiation poisoning after becoming stone in the daytime,” he wrote me. I hate him