Thread by @Jenny_Trout

Okay, I'm going to retell my Doctor Who nerd fight story because I didn't tell it with enough dramatic flair when it was happening. Also, if this guy is out there following me thinking we're awesome colleagues, this is how that conversation experience went for me, okay? Learn.

So, last year, me and @Bronwyn_Green and @jessjarman were at a multi-genre writing conference. So, like, every romance author who has ever attended a mutli-genre conference already knows what this fucking environment is gonna be like, right? Okay.

If you're not a romance writer and you don't know, what happens is that someone will strike up a conversation with you, ask what you write, and then when you say romance, their entire facial expression and demeanor instantly change. It's VISIBLE.

So, this guy, (white, cis, middle-aged, presumably heterosexual dude), comes up to Bron and Jess and I and introduces himself as a mystery writer (already, romance writers reading this are rolling their eyes, I can feel that disturbance in the force right now).

And I think the conversation started because he noticed my "Time Lady" tattoo or one of us had a Doctor Who shirt on or something, but he asked us what we thought about the new Doctor being a woman.

Guess what his opinion on it was.

So, this is a professional conference, I have to at least *try* to act professional, so I say something about how Jodie was great on Broadchurch and Chris Chibnall directed her in that so we're lucky that we're getting them as a team because they work so great together, etc.

But he launches right into weak fanboy shit I don't even remember, trying to talk about how it doesn't make sense for these reasons, etc. So, I just stand up and go to the bathroom and abandon Bron and Jess, but they understand that I don't want to go to jail.

I stand in there for like, ten minutes, thinking, okay, this guy is certainly gone by now. But I come back and he's *still* going. And Bron and Jess are just watching him, totally captivated by how big an ass this dude is making of himself right now.

We're at a point in the conversation where he's making a last, desperate reach. And he goes, "Okay, but let's say you have a male Time Lord and a female Time Lord and they want to have a baby, but one of them regenerates into the opposite gender?"

And I look at this guy. I look him dead in the eye. And I say:

"Time Lords are woven on Looms."

Dude literally sputtered. "Uh, well, uh, see..."

Now, if he knew a much about Doctor Who as he *thought* he knew (more than any of us silly women with our kissing books and such), he would have been able to engage in debate over the "canon-ness" of Looms.

But he didn't know. I mean, this dude used "Time Lords" and "Gallifreyans" interchangeably, so...

What happened was this dude saw us sitting there, and he saw three strikes against us right off the bat:

1. Female
2. Middle-Aged
3. Write Romance

And as such, obviously, we couldn't know about anything about HIS fandom.

I have a tiny little orgasm in my brain every time I think of the look on his face. The orgasm makes a TARDIS landing noise.