I was taken by the rather-obvious-to-a-writer comments about 'voice'. It should be obvious to a reader, but all too often isn't, that the voice of a character is not always the voice of the author. As Brugman says, a book is full of characters, and they can't all be the writer. I have seen too many examples of people commenting "But she says that---" when what they mean is that the author has a character say it. A well-written character has their own voice, which the author should hear and transmit, rather than simply being a speaking tube.

I was also glad to see that there wasn't the usual claim of originality that comes when a mainstream author 'has an original idea' that has already been published by another writer. SF authors suffer a lot from this, where their creations (Greybeard, Counterclockworld) are taken by Great Writers and rewritten (Children of Men, Time's Arrow). They are then presented and hailed as 'stunningly original concepts'.

It took me a long while to get into the Gaby books, and I have only really done so since the tension between Drew's masculinity and his increasingly female body became so sharp. Good stories need tension, after all. But our own Maddy, among so many others, has produced literate and absorbing tales for younger people that engage with being intersexed, and for Brugman to have claimed originality would have been rather rude. Fair play to her for that. I will reserve my comments on her writing, of course, until I have experienced it.