OH! Allyson, you were also in a dream of mine this weekend. I was braiding your hair into two long braids.

It must have been at the same time I was writing you a letter! It's so nice to receive mail that isn't a bill.

My agent met msbelle and Jesse and dropped me an email that read, "you really do know people everywhere!"

I asked Buffistas a question, for a friend, the other day. I mentioned to her later that two of the people I'd expected to hear from were in Greece and Australia. She was all, "You have really far flung contacts," amazed I know people so far away from me.

Her reponse amused me, because this particular friend is a Bronzer who lives in UK (Rachie, for those that know her).

Who cares how geeky it sounds, if it works out?

I agree! For my part, I don't really care what other people think, it's just more of a in-the-moment, "how will this go over with this person" social anxiety thing. The anxiety is not really connected to shame or desire for approval.

Getting realmail is fun and now I get to expect some of my own. Oh reminds me I need to do the lemon bars.

Not that the place wasn't full of fans, and not that there's anything wrong with that ... but, yeah, it was nice.

Totally. I'm not slagging on anyone who won a contest or whatever, because god knows I would LOVE to be a fan who won a contest to go to a thing like that, but... that's not how you all got there.

b) I blurted out something terribly fannish about Angel later on anyway.

Tim's date was a Fox Studio Exec who was a huge fangirl about Firefly, so he gave her his plus one. She was all happy and gushy about it all.

Curiously, Tim went to the party in that big cavernous room and tried to get to Joss to say hello, and the security guards tried to push her back (by push, I don't mean shove, just the whole, "I AM SO INTIMIDATING" horseshit) and she said, "I'm not a fan!"

Which made me laugh. Because I swear most of the crowding people were not in fact, "fans" but "hangers on." Which I find pathetic, where fans are mostly just cute. Like us.

I had to explain friends knowing writers who know actors who are sometimes nice to indulge fans.

These things are so much more difficult when you (well, I) are an ocean away, from a different language, and practice a religion in which many people see tv as the source of all evil.

I was so excited about Nathan Fillion calling msbelle that I was telling MY real-life friends about it.

Yeah, me too. And in trying to explain who these people are, I end up going to "that girl I stayed with in LA? And that girl who teaches krav whose class I attended? And that girl I stayed with in NYC?". The one thing that makes it easier is that when I say 'LA' here, people automatically assume Hollywood and it gets a bit easier from there.

you really do know people everywhere!

Usually I tell people I stayed with friends when I was in the USA. They sometimes ask how I got to meet them, sometimes automatically assume that said friends are Jewish, mostly totally freak out - a year after the fact and when I'm standing all alive and well right there in front of them - that I stayed with people I met online. There is only a handful of people who know that the trip was a gift, let alone Tim's involvement. A few will probably learn about it when they get to read Allyson's book, though. Hee.

where can I get this book??? Want now please

My agent sent out the proposal last week? Week before? I dunno, feels like years. Either no one will buy it, or someone will, and it'll be published.

I'm in a place where I'm thinking it's still a pipedream.

I'm trying to think of the name of a dial-up community that was around before the internet took off, back in the early days of AOL and Compuserve... but I'm drawing a blank.

eta: Delphi - that's what I was trying to think of....

I'm in a place where I'm thinking it's still a pipedream.

Allyson, how long ago was it that you thought that having an agent who loves your work and understands it is merely a dream?