The joy of surprising a reader

[shadowscast]

As I've mentioned previously in this space, over the summer I wrote a fanfic novel which I knew all along would have hardly any readers, since it's in a small, obscure, old, dead fandom.

But, delightfully, I have a fannish friend who read it, and last night I got to talk to her about it. (Squee!)

The thing that really, really delighted me was that I got to find out that a surprise that I had carefully built into the text worked on her! :-D

I mean, you know how it is when you're trying to surprise your reader with something, but also trying to leave enough hints lying around so that when the reveal happens, the reader will say "Oh my gosh, I should have guessed that!"

Anyway, I had one of those. And it worked! And I am so happy. Hooray!

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[trepkos]

Remind me what fandom it was, if you don't mind?

[shadowscast]

Once A Thief—a Canadian show that aired for one season in the late 1990's. I think it also aired in Australia, but nowhere else; in particular, I don't think it ever aired in the States, although the pilot and the last two episodes (?) were later released in the States on VHS as a TV movie. It had more fannish following than you'd expect for something so obscure, because one of the leads was played by the same actor who played Krycek in the X-Files. Still though, it's been a long time since it had an active fandom.