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nonelvis posting in

Last rec of the week! I'm still looking for more reccers starting in mid- to late November, so please drop by the sign-up post if you're interested, and tell your friends to drop by, too.

Story: Detectives, Adventurers and Girls Who Don't Wait Around: The Paradox of Amelia J. Williams
Author: LizBee
Rating: All Ages
Word Count: 2,808
Author's Summary: Between her debut in 1938 and her death in 1993, Amelia Williams probably wrote over five hundred novels, short stories and articles.
Characters/Pairings: Amy Pond, Rory Williams
Warnings: None

Recced because: Amy Williams: kissogram, model, travel writer ... and incredibly prolific pulp and children's fiction author, too. This "essay" reviews Williams' career and her work's impact on children (and adults) of all ages, including some children and adults you'll no doubt find familiar.

I love everything about this story – its detailed history of how Amy's writing evolved over the years; the sly references to other Whoniverse characters; the Photoshopped book covers; and especially, the style in which it's written and the "author" to whom it's attributed. In fact, there's only thing that disappoints me about it: that Williams' books don't really exist, so I can't read them.

Excerpt:

Enid Blyton never made it big in America. You can find her books here and there, and maybe people have heard of them in passing, but improbable summertime adventures, magical islands and lashings of ginger beer never permeated the American consciousness. They had their own adventure stories: Nancy Drew, Trixie Beldon, the Hardy Boys … and, of course, the work of Amelia Williams, who was briefly known in the UK, during the late '40s and the early '50s, as "the American Enid Blyton".

She was quite unhappy about that. Not at the comparison to a novelist already being denounced as a bad influence and a hack -- she enjoyed a bit of Enid, and gleefully ordered each new title from the UK -- but because she was, in fact, Scottish.