The joy of surprising a reader

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!