fanfiction_is_for_teenage_girls epitome of incomprehensibility ...but sometimes one waits until middle_age to arrange sporadically planned words and make them "official." What I mean: this is the title of the poetry chapbook that I wrote AND that Cactus Press published. Yay! One accomplishment of 2025. That's for the year. As for the term, a chapbook is a short poetry book - a chap off the old block, as a zine is a chopped magazine. Oh yes, and I'm not excluding anyone from fanfiction, even jokingly: there's no "only." It's just that I focus on fanfiction cooked up from books I read as a teenager, sometimes starring teen characters - as in the piece where Anne_of_Green_Gables hops fictional universes to murder other characters. But things also got weirdly autobiographical - slightly_autobiographical, at least - amidst goofy weirdnesses. Even when time-hopping Scheherazade confesses her love for Queen Esther, the bit about her crying over a Subway sandwich after the reincarnated Esther's wedding is straight from (also gay from) the sad_romantic sorrows_of_young_e_o_i. (To be honest, I ate the sandwich before the wedding, which I also moved from May to January. Poetic_license.) I submitted my first draft December last year and did most of the revisions in August. In the summer, personal touches from me and two others prodded things into shape: e.g., the main editor thought a different poem about Queen Esther seemed too abstract, so I added more life. (The_Nostratic_Hypothesis, but it's different now.) On_writing: it can be both permanent and changing. Anyway, much credit to Willow for being such a sensitive and flexible editor. And to Devon for cooking up an amazing cover design given rather vague cues. And most of all to dear_red, blather_red, the red_family - you know who you are! - for hosting the ideas and sometimes the early drafts that went into this. You can get this at https://devongallant.wixsite.com/cactuspresspoetry/chapbook-catalog/fanfiction-is-for-teenage-girls (Alert, though: if you're a particular person who's sent me music, you miiiight just get this in the mail instead.) 251230 ... raze i *just* received this (along with some other wonderful things)! i can't wait to read it. (also, a long overdue email is in the works.) 251230 ... ovenbird Congratulations! What a wonderful accomplishment! (Heads into the interwebs to procure a copy immediately...) 251230 ... ovenbird e_o_i your chapbook arrived today and I spent a lovely, sun drenched bit of the afternoon reading it, and I just wanted to say that I enjoyed it thoroughly and was fascinated to see the shift between the drafts and fragments that began in various forms here on blather and the polished pieces that you published. I like having a tiny window into process and I was afforded that in a roundabout way. I think the Anne of Green Gables poem was my favourite but I was impressed with the book as a whole, which contains all sorts of clever turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes and interesting pivots from one imagistic direction to another. I wish you tons of luck with your novel! 260210 ... e_o_i Oh, thank you!! I'm glad you found things to like and connect with. That means a lot to me. ... Related - about relatives, anyway - my aunt recently asked for another copy for her granddaughter. She's the teenage daughter of Julia, one of my older cousins. So I questioned myself, convolutedly, "Is Fanfiction Is for Teenage Girls for teenage girls?" I decided it was if she was 15, but not if she was still 14. Then I was annoyed at the arbitrariness of this proclamation and also at the fact that I forget her birthday. I saw her this summer when they visited, but I couldn't remember if she'd turned 15 yet. But is it really about the poems being "appropriate" for whatever age? Is it more that I'm embarrassed about a relative reading about my own sex-related imaginings as a silly, twisted virgin teen (the "Choir of Thoughts" one)? Not that it's terribly explicit...and she might think the narrator another character, if she reads it. And now that I think back on things, it didn't harm me to sneak peeks into a romance book about David and Bathsheba when I was 12 (except for making "Bible romantic fanfiction" a theme, I guess). What disturbed me more around that age were Lurlene McDaniel's YA books where teenagers get cancer or suffer other life-threatening situations - including one in the backstory of Angel of Mercy, which alludes to what was probably the Rwandan genocide, but she's vague when she writes about Africa. Where was I again? North America. Mailing small books from Quebec to Ontario. Teenagers. I did end up sending another copy to Aunt Sarah to give to her. Possibly for her birthday. 260210 what's it to you? who go blather from