In which a fandom fangirls

[bloodygranuaile]

I went to this year’s Murderbooze with not a lot of reading material, because I had been intending on writing instead (which did not happen; thanks, body). This resulted in me resorting to reading stuff on the Kindle app on my actual phone, a thing I do relatively rarely even when I have taken Twitter off the stupid thing, because apparently I’d rather fuck around on social media when waiting for the bus instead of doing any of the million other things one can do on a phone, many of which I specifically downloaded as alternatives to fucking around on social media (apologies to my flashcard apps). 

I don’t remember when I’d actually started reading The Queen’s Readers: A Collection of Essays on the Words and Worlds of Tamora Pierce, but I do remember deciding to make it the iPhone book because it was a compilation of short essays and I didn’t want to risk getting too lost if I went months or years without opening it in between reading sessions, which I did on several occasions. 
 

I remember when this book was first being put together and I didn’t get around to coming up with an essay to contribute, possibly in part because I wasn’t sure I had anything good enough to say. To be entirely honest, I regret my shyness here, because the quality of the essays that were accepted is pretty uneven, and I’m reasonably sure that if I had drafted off a quick ramble about something it still would have ended up in the middle of the pack. I could also have offered to line edit, or copy edit, or at least proofread, since there are a lot of language errors, ranging from dropped words to one essay where every single dependent clause has been turned into a sentence fragment. 
 

While some of the essays are analytical, others are personal, and still others are essentially book reports, listing data on a specific character or theme and not doing a whole lot with the information. For some essays, the fact that they’re short is therefore a blessing; for the more interesting ones, though, a bit more length would have allowed them to develop their arguments in more depth. The result, essentially, is that this is an amateur work, and therefore it was frustrating as a publishing professional to experience it as something already published and therefore that I can’t fix. On the other hand, as a member of the Tamora Pierce fandom, a lot of the personal essays were very heartwarming and it was nice to see how much of a mark these books have made on so many people. 
 

The essays were split about evenly between ones about the Tortall books and ones about the Emelan books, which, despite my being a lifelong devotee of the Tortall series, I’ve never gotten around to reading. I read one of them, once, but I am under the impression they’re pitched to a slightly younger audience, and I didn’t really feel like reading younger for a while. I’m actually now considering that it might be worth checking them out, which goes to show how mentally and emotionally exhausted I am lately.