Kimberly Hirsh logo Kimberly Hirsh

I attended my first dissertation defense yesterday. I came home and told W. that we’ll be doing theater warm-ups before mine.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Fangirl Cover

I just finished reading Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. And now I want to be best friends with her, because she gets me.

This book means so much to me. I didn’t have a good time in college. I was lonely. I had no interest in partying. I was clinically depressed. And fandom saved my life.

I did have an adorable tall boyfriend with a receding hairline. (Reader, I married him.) He talked through my magnum opus with me, a blatant Mary Sue in which I wrote my hopes and dreams for season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I deleted it from fanfiction.net in a fit of embarrassment in 2009, but I’m planning to resurrect it from my old personal domain in the Wayback Machine and post it to AO3 soon.)

I was more distant from my sister than I’d ever been in my life. My little brother was very sick and ended up hospitalized.

I got a job explicitly to pay my way to fannish events. I made so many fandom friends. I printed up pages and pages of fanfic.

I started a fan campaign. It gave me a sense of purpose when my grades were tanking and my mom was in the hospital.

I embarked on a teaching career in a town two hundred miles away from anyone I loved. I read fanfic and posted on forums and LiveJournal and it was my only human contact outside of work.

This book just feels very personal and I’m so grateful to Rainbow Rowell for writing it.

I organized my closet and now I’m too tired to cook dinner. This is peak Kimberly.

Text: "Rupert Giles Actual School Librarian" and "A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Story by Kimberly Hirsh" on a brown background, in front of an image of antique books on a bookcase to the right of a wooden podium with a framed picture on the front of it.Still drafting the first chapter, but it has a cover and a summary…

The Watchers Council had made certain promises. First, that Rupert Giles would have no trouble getting his cover job as the new school librarian at Sunnydale High School. Second, that this role would require minimal actual librarianing, which was a good thing, as he had been rather distracted during his library studies coursework what with all the simultaneous advanced Watcher training. And third, that he would not have to deal with teenagers other than the Slayer herself.

The Watchers Council had lied.

Miserable human beings who you wouldn’t want to spend a second with in real life are capable of making something great that is beautiful or useful to you.

 

I’ve fallen down an internet rabbit hole! My current work = reading about cosplay. Cosplay is part of fandom, and I feel disconnected from fandom so I started listening to Fansplaining to get me back in touch, and that took me to Wattpad, and then I started reading a Wattpad blog post that linked to Fanlore (which I already knew about but have never explored in-depth) and now I guess I’m going to just die of starvation while reading all of Fanlore? But also, please stay tuned for details about my upcoming fic, Rupert Giles, Actual School Librarian.