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Uh...yes! That’s exactly what I meant. They...play matchmaker for one another and then...go on a double date. It’s definitely not something else. And now onto JayDee’s review of Moonlit Snow! Oh, shut up, you! I’m genuinely curious, how did you expect the ending to go? Thank you! This is in large part thanks to you asking that very question. I think (though I can’t remember precisely) you may have even offered me the idea that there were those who felt the prejudice, but had to be careful not to offend the church. It was only while writing the bandit fight that I realized that Hopkin could serve as a representative of the less devout, who would just openly insult Lady Aldreda over her albinism, which brought up the idea that she can pretty well handle blunt insults like that, but that the more “polite” ones hurt worse because of how she just has to take them. The tactical stuff was part of my research into medieval combat, which was where I got both Lady Aldreda’s swordplay moves and the knowledge that plate armor more or less makes you immune to a sword (unless it’s stabbed into the chain mail in the joints), but a mace is still dangerous. As for the Serenity moment, I just loved the idea of it so there was no way it wasn’t making it into the story! I didn’t end up settling on precisely why Hopkin and his bandits started doing this, but they’re definitely somewhat lower class people (hence Hopkin’s “m’lady” as opposed to “my lady”) and my vague idea was something like what you suggested, and a failed harvest seems the most likely thing. Either that or his restaurant chain, IHOPkin, recently went under. The whole “stealing due to hard times” thing is actually what’s behind Aldreda just letting Hopkin and Mack go. She gets the impression from their amateur status that these men may be jerks, but they’re probably only doing this out of desperation, so she wants them to have a second chance. On the “m’lady” thing, Elis is also originally from a lower class background (farm work), but he addresses Aldreda like that so much that when I wrote him saying it as “m’lady”, I kept imagining him donning a fedora. I figure he may have picked up the more formal manner of saying it due to being around Lady Aldreda for the last three years. Thank you! That was another thing picked up through research. Some of the videos I watched were analyzing Hollywood sword fights, and one of the most common things that came up is that movie choreographers love big wide swings because of how cool they look, but in actual combat that’s a bad idea for exactly the reason Lady Aldreda gives. The videos called it “telegraphing”, but given the setting I obviously couldn’t use that term. Yeah I was trying to come up with a word other than “fireworks” and I thought of how when several of them go off in a cluster they can almost look like bouquet of flowers. That was exactly what I was going for. Elis is kind of like the kid with a crush on his teacher, albeit because of her rescuing him she’s more than just a teacher, she’s his idol; his personal hero. There is absolutely that desire on his part to grow up faster, to be the man he thinks she’ll want. Which, of course, leads directly into… That was another thing that came up in research, that there was this swordplay treatise where it was recommended to “end your opponent rightly” by throwing the pommel of the sword at them. Every video I saw said this had to be a joke, so I had Lady Aldreda use it like that, and then decided to compound the joke by having it actually used to end the fight. To an extent yes. He’ll be a more proficient fighter and more adult, though I’d imagine he’ll still look up to Lady Aldreda. That’s kind of a thing in my writing, I guess, where the woman is the man’s protector or teacher or mentor. People seem to be enjoying it thus far, though, so hopefully it will continue to be fun to read. I believe there’s a different thread for that.

I wrote some of my early fanfic attempts in pen pre-internet including a really terrible vampire story. No porn fics in them days for me! Don’t recall precisely now the first fanfic I read. Never looked at that sort of thing at school, but I first got on the internet at home in the late 90s. So, in terms of internet fanfic from others, I would have first read it either on a geocities fansite or one of the alt.fan newsgroups for me. I seem to recall alt.fan.pratchett was specifically against fan fiction being posted there, but not all of them were like that. Though many newsgroups were basically dying by that point it didn’t take long to find newsgroups with more dedicated FF content either. I had my own geocities fansite for a while with ther standard web ring links and and hit counters. They didn’t have a lot of space and the amount of page impressions allowed in an hour was tiny, but still good times… There was a long gone site called something like trekslash.ca which I am pretty sure was where I read a lot of really good Janeway/Torres femslash. One author was amazing and I can’t even recall their name. I found the early version of the Grey Archive in about 2000 and it was on there I first heard of AFF being set up a couple years later. If I am remembering right this was after the FF.net first big mature content purge. I lurked/anonymously reviewed on AFF and didn’t join with my original account here ‘til 2004. Weird to think how much time has passed tbh.

I was a kid. It was like 1997 or 1998 and I was kinda exploring the internet for the first time. Found some websites for my favourite (at the time) TV show, Breaker High (A canadian high school drama) and lo and behold, one of the sites had fics on it! I didn’t know wtf fan fiction was, so I read those fics thinking they were like transcripts of episodes. I thought I had watched every episode there was so I was super excited that they didn’t sound familiar. And then they got dirty. That’s when I kinda realized that these ‘episodes’ did not uphold the Canadian Broadcast Co. standards. Then I realized if other people could write that shit, so the hell could I! With my newfound godly powers, I impregnated the whole cast of characters, because… well, because I could. Yup.