Delia Sherman who wrote The Changeling, my favourite Middle Grade of 2006,1 totally has the fairy she thinks she has. The idea for Ro’s fairy comes from watching Delia in action:

I suspect I have the shopping fairy. And I wish I had the plot fairy—it would be so much more useful in my professional life. Probably ain’t going to happen, though. Can you see me going for months and months, possibly years, without shopping? Me neither.

I won’t lie. I LONG for Delia’s fairy. I have seen her go to Filene’s Basement and Century 21 (giant department stores packed to the gills with people and stuff) and find the best clothes in the UNIVERSE. I go to those places and all I find are claustrophobic panic attacks.

I don’t need to explain who Libba Bray is or what she writes, do I? Just in case: She is the author of the Sweet & Terrible Beauty trilogy. Yes, she’s the one who [redacted] [redacted]. And her next book, Going Bovine, is EVEN BETTER. Here are the fairies she has and wants:

I think I have an Absurdist fairy, [Justine says: She so TOTALLY does!] one that both allows me to see the absurd in everything and that presents me with a fair amount of the wacky. It’s always a Fellini film in my head.

I wish I had either a metabolism fairy that allowed me to eat everything I want whenever I want and burn it all off whilst lounging around reading or a theoretical physics fairy that made it possible for me to understand everything inside Ed Witten’s brain while also grasping anything above third grade math.

John Scalzi, who can write anything at any length because he has verbal diarrhea2 is a genius, desires a similar fairy to Libba:

I wish I had a fairy that would make bacon double cheeseburgers a slimming health food. Because that would rock.

But has a pretty useless one:

I did have a “know who is calling on the phone as soon as it rings” fairy for a while, which used to freak people out when I would pick up the phone and call them by their name without saying hello first. However, in the age of call waiting, this fairy has become far less useful than it was back in the day. Stupid advances in technology.

In case you’re wondering why Scalzi is telling you what his fairy is when he doesn’t actually write YA it’s because he DOES write YA. His latest, Zoe’s Tale is TOTALLY YA. And bloody good unputdownable YA at that. So, nyer!

Wow, there are a lot of fairies out there. When I started How To Ditch Your Fairy I had no idea how many there were. I spent days scratching my head struggling to come up with enough. How stupid was I? Don’t answer that.

You can find other fairies here. And feel free to keep sharing yours over here or in the comments to this post or on your own blog or wherever you want really. It’s all good.

1. Yes, in my world YA includes Middle Grade. Deal. [↩]
2. Hey, he always says I’m his favourite Australian when I happen to know I’m the ONLY Australian he knows. [↩]