I mostly just wanted to say thank you for being so forthcoming about where you are in life. I always worry I'll get criticized for being in fandom even as I get older and older, but seeing awesome people like you, who have established careers and kids and the whole nine yards and still come and gift us with your stories, that really makes me happy. Thanks.
You know, you really won’t get criticized: there’s LOTS OF US GROWNUPS, and we used to be NORM before fandom got all, like, trendy and stuff! The thing is, in the days before these easy peasy social media sites where you plug in a user name and a password and boom, you basically HAD to be grownup to do fandom! You needed to know FTP and basic HTML and like, buy plane tickets to conventions or show up at weird restaurants to meet someone you’d talked to on email. THIS WAS UPHILL IN THE SNOW, and you had to BYOB (buy your own boots :D) I’m still honestly shocked every time someone’s like obviously in high school or whatever; it’s just, that’s so incredibly recent that there were the means for younger people to participate to this extent, though I think it’s great - I was writing fanfic at that age too, but it was so much harder to share it, and I think we’ll have more continuity over generations, too.