"Everybody wants to be us."
The Devil Wears Prada came out in summer 2006, but I didn’t discover it until months later, when it made it to cable TV and I chanced to catch the second half of it while visiting my sister. “Sexy vibe between the female leads,” I thought, “I’ll make sure to watch all of it when I get home.”
But I was already writing my first DWP fanfic in my head during the drive home. It was the first of many. And by the time fall 2007 rolled around, I was entertaining ever wilder ideas. “What if one of them took a love potion?” “What if one of them was a pirate queen…in SPACE?”
“What if Miranda Priestly got pregnant?”
The last one made me laugh the first time I thought of it. After all, Miranda was, what, fifty? And so dignified, focused, and hard-assed. It’d be fun to play with. Why not? Just a short, silly story–what we called “crackfic” in those days, a fic with a ridiculous premise that nobody could ever believe.
I even came up with a title for it. “Fetching,” based on the line in the movie when Miranda tells Andy, “You are very fetching, so go fetch.” And I imagined Andy fetching-and-carrying for a pregnant Miranda, obeying her whims. It’d be fun to have it in her POV, observing a pregnant Miranda while the reader identified with Andy’s incredulity. After all, the whole premise was nuts, right?
So I started with the line: Personally, Andy thought Miranda Priestly had nobody to blame but herself.
Fittingly, the story took me nine months to write. (I stopped in the middle of it to write The Lily and the Crown, that story I mentioned about Miranda being a pirate queen in space, and which I also turned into a book.) By summer 2008, I was looking at over 270,000 words of my funny little story with the ridiculous premise and wondering if anybody–anybody–would read past the paragraph in which they learned that Miranda was pregnant. (This was pre-AO3, before the days of tagging, and I decided to keep that bit under wraps: The Plot Twist.)
Some people would read it, though, right? I mean, it seemed like they would. People liked long stories with explicit sex scenes, so maybe they’d get past the pregnancy thing. It was possible that my immense investment of time and energy would feel worthwhile. Right?
And even if it didn’t, I’d had a blast writing the story, no matter how weird it was. So if the fandom reacted positively to it overall, that was good enough for me, and when I had the energy and inspiration, I’d move on to the next thing.
Nearly fourteen years later, the original story remains my most popular on AO3. By far. It’s had legs I could never have imagined. People have told me it’s the “femslash Bible,” the must-read for fans of sapphic fanfic. I still regularly get comments on it (which I’m terrible about replying to so many years later, sorry everybody, but I do cherish them!). People still email or send me messages. I say this not to brag, but to express my astonishment that something I thought was a ridiculous idea has had such an immense impact on my fannish life.
And now, my life beyond fandom too. My wonderful publisher, Ylva, reached out to me years ago about turning T&M into a novel. I dismissed the idea at the time–who’d ever read this as a novel? Who’d be interested??
You see the pattern.
But then I changed my mind. I dipped my toe into the waters by transforming two other DWP fanfics: The Lily and the Crown and The X Ingredient. Those experiences were enough to let me know that changing fanfic into original material is harder than it seems, and that a true challenge lay before me. After a couple of false starts, I was finally satisfied that I’d kept what I’d loved of my original story and fixed in it what I’d wanted to fix for years.
After the publication of the story’s second half, Above All Things, I’ll write a blog entry about those fixes. For now, it’s enough for me to say that nobody’s more surprised by T&M’s enduring popularity than I am–or more grateful. I’m so, so, so grateful for the readers who took a chance on a story that seemed preposterous, and I’m just as grateful for the new readers who are doing the same thing now.
I hope you’ll find it worth your while. I know I did.