hi I'm a professional author! My most recent book, BURNING ROSES.... is duh duh duhhhh....

ENTIRELY FANFICTION!!!!

and I'm damn proud of it. Join me for a pleasant minithread about my joyful fanfic?

Burning Roses is the tale of Red Riding Hood as a middle-aged woman

.....who is a recovering assassin....
.....who fell in love with Beauty from Beauty & the Beast....
.....and Beauty is Fantasy!Asian

(selling daughters to far-off princes to pay off debts is Bad, doncha know)

It's also the tale of Houyi and Chang'e -- the archer and the moon goddess, one of the most famous stories from Chinese folklore.

And guess what omg they are ALL MIXED UP together in an AU where they MEET and have ADVENTURES and angst about their families!!!

oh yeah and Houyi is a trans woman

it is basically an #EveryoneIsQueer fanfic of folklore and fairy tales

I am so, so serious btw!! It is 100% an #EveryoneIsQueer fanfic of all the stories I grew up on!

Just because these stories are public domain doesn't mean it isn't fanfic -- I used exactly the same skills I would writing an AU to craft this book. It remixes and subverts, takes the knowledge people are coming in with & leans on it only to then surprise it

It's a love letter to the source material while at the same time pleading with every part of it that left me out..... (y'all know what I'm talking about)

Because god, do I love these stories I'm basing on. I LOVE them. The first play I was ever in was Beauty and the Beast. It is MINE

And yet these stories were not written for me....

There is so much absolute power in taking a story with cultural significance -- whether that story is under copyright or not -- and remolding it, subverting it, constructing something new and fierce and dangerous and beautiful. It is WONDER and it is POWER

I poured *all* of those feelings into Burning Roses. And the responses I get from people -- the responses!

People tell me -- they tell me thank you. That these fairy tales never felt "allowed" for them until they read what I did with it

People tell me I opened a door for them, where they always felt excluded

People tell me I made them feel welcome, in a culture that didn't welcome them before

And some people -- some people! -- scoff at what I did. They tell me that these stories weren't "mine" to repurpose. (Yes, I had someone say almost exactly this! To my face! On a panel!)

Because this shit never ends, does it? We're never "allowed" to take up this space, in these places.

Well, too bad. We're here, we're remixing all your touchstones into CHAOS and we're not going away

And guess what? At the end of the day, whatever the debate, Tor published an absolutely beautiful hardcover of my Red Riding Hood & Houyi #wlw #EveryoneIsQueer fanfic

And it got in the fucking New York Times

and it's out there and people are paying real money to read my delightful Red/Beauty femmeslash (no explicit sex tho, sorry )

and more importantly all my queer and Asian fam can read it too.

And in every interview that asks about inspiration, if I say all of the above minus the "it's fanfiction", people are like "OOOOOOOO YESS SO PRO SO EXCELLENT."

But.... all of this is exactly what fanfic is???? For a lot of people, at least!

On any sort of philosophical level I am doing exactly what tons of people on AO3 do! This is what it is! This is what all those feelings are -- it's fanfiction! (Oh and btw I straight up say that in a lot of interviews too )

And sure, people get many other things out of fanfiction also. But this is *one* of the things and *one* of the energies people bring to it and it's why *I* love fanfiction and why I wrote a ridiculous fairy tale novella that messes with everyone's childhood MWAHAHAHA

Basically, same energy as an Uhura/Rose Tico crossover where they're both queer old ladies shooting at things ;)

Anyway, don't stop writing fanfiction. It is respectable and real and can be such an extremely powerful way to respond to media and culture. And we need it.