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I have finished Among Others and am now up for talking about it with anyone who wants, especially whoever it was on my friends list who was upset about how Mori felt about Harriet Vane, because I don't think it's about Harriet at all really, it's about romance, and I don't agree with Mori, but I think I might understand.

I am very glad to have read it, and I need to go back through it for books I haven't read yet (the SF book club could make a lot of $ on an Among Others special where you order all the books mentioned). But it has not had that special resonance for me that it has had for a lot of people I've seen posting about it. It does not seem like my story, and if I had read it when I was 12, it would not have saved my life, or even changed it much. Though I would have liked it then too.

I sort of wish I had read it before I became friends with Jo, though. even though I would not have wanted to wait a decade extra for that, because the autobiographical bits of this book are interacting with my memories of conversations with her. It's not bad, it actually adds a fascinating extra dimension, but it's a bit like having spoilers, or like skipping the first date.

Writer's Block: The name game

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Stakebait was Spike's email address in a particularly cracktastic RPG I was playing with thebratqueen  once upon a time, in which I was everyone from Buffy's Sunnydale and she was everyone from Angel's L.A. Which itself was a spin-off of a cross-over between Strange Bedfellows, the Spike/Buffy fanfic series I was co-writing with buffybot , and Epiphany, the Angel/Wesley series TBQ was writing.

The cross-over was planned; the weird moment of Spike/Wesley chemistry at the end was not, and utterly failed to make sense in either continuity. So we AUed it and took it to email. But while most of our lots had obvious, if imaginary, email addies @uc.sunnydale.edu or @angel-investigations.com, that didn't work for Spike. So I came up with stakebait at hotmail and, in the interest of geeky authenticity, claimed it to make sure no one else did. When I finally got sucked into LJ for Jossverse fannish activities, it was a ready-made AKA.

It's a little weird now, since I've mostly gafiated from Buffy fandom and never found another to take its place. But it's got enough significant name recognition that I'm unlikely to change it, unless and until I get really bowled over by some new identity. (lorum_ipsum  is taken). I tend to have a new and unrelated username on every site anyway -- the only rule used to be that none of them contained numbers, and then I broke that with rankine916.

Besides, I still have a soft spot for that RPG, which ran for ages in email and chat and once, even an all-night phone call. Though it's been years since we took them out of the box, I still have most of those characters in my head, after their other versions have long since gone to sleep.