As a rule, I don’t fangirl. Â I was trained to be a professional, starting at age 19, and it stuck. Â I admire and respect the people I work with, but even the most amazing talents don’t reduce me to gibbering incoherence.
Except once.
I’d just read a book, a lovely, marvelous book, and then turned around quite literally and encountered the author having lunch by himself in the relative quiet before World Fantasy.  And I interrupted him to gush about how wonderful that book was.
It was a horrible breach of manners, by my training, and he’s been teasing me about it ever since.
The book was Requiem, and the author was Graham Joyce.
Graham was recently diagnosed with cancer (as too damn many of our writers have been, recently) and he posted this today. Go, read.
 “Really, I’d love to rant and rave about the injustice of it all, (in the way I like to rant and rave about social injustice in this country) but I can’t. There is a shocking and beautiful indifference at large in the universe, and I just have to work with it. And because you are even reading this I am tremendously moved.”
I’ve never truly regretted my fangirling that day, as embarrassing as it was. Â This is why.