Fame Come Lately

It is the great tragedy of the arts that the majority of creatives do not receive recognition in their lifetime.

The Author known to the world as Natasja Rose, amid widespread debate over whether that was her actual name or a pseudonym (She herself was frequently quoted as finding the debate amusing, and refusing to confirm or deny on those grounds) became a household name some years after her death. While we will never know what Natasja Rose herself thinks of this, her surviving loved ones viewed the phenomenon with varying degrees of pride and annoyance. "We knew how creative she was," stated a friend who asked that their name be withheld. "The trouble was getting everyone else to see it, too."

"She always dreamed of making a living off of her art," said a niece, who declined to confirm whether the relationship was biological, honorary or otherwise. "It's a shame she only went viral after she died. And stop asking how we're related, it's rude."

Natasja Rose and her wife of many years, Lyndal, left behind a dizzying network of cousins of various degrees, and siblings both biological and honorary. Many would-be biographers have declared that sorting out who is who has been the most frustrating part of background research.

Like all popular writers, there are diverse and conflicting opinions on Natasja's writing, and how it was affected by her personal life.

While openly and proudly a member of the LGBTQ+ and Disabled communities, Natasja Rose avoided the common writer's trap of making all of her writing about those identities.

While readers can certainly point to a certain degree of Neurospiciness in many of her characters, particularly those in her Jane Austen Variations, and a variety of gender and sexual identities scattered richly throughout her other books, Natasja was perhaps best known for treating all of her characters as "people" first, regardless of identity.

Following the example of Sir Terry Prachett's plea to let Minorities be Good People and also petty, small-minded bastards on occasion, no character was without fault or flaw, though it could be said that most at least had good intentions. What those good intentions looked like in practice, rather than principle, was often the twist on which a short story turned.

No LGBTQ+ character was granted unrealistic plot armour for fear of accusations of "kill your Gays". While the accusation was certainly made, Natasja Rose laughed it off, as the accusation was commonly levelled at her book The Queen's Blade, which she had laughingly described as "having a Token Straight". While Queer characters did die, so did Straight ones, and in a story describing a civil uprising, it would have broken the suspension of disbelief to keep all of the main cast alive.

In similar veins, Natasja did not shy away from having main characters of various nationalities, though she could perhaps be overly-cautious in not devolving into stereotypes. This is not to say that characters of colour were written badly, merely that, like many melanin-challenged writers, she was too careful about letting those characters fail or be construed in stereotypical ways.

Some readers have been quoted as viewing this as a moral failing, while others see it as common of many writers fearful of Cancel Culture. In both fiction and non-fiction writings, Natasja Rose could never be accused of failing to stand by her ideals, or of failing to let those ideals evolve with new information.

Indeed, the only true consensus among readers is the general agreement that Natasja's lack of fame in her lifetime was at least partially due to her refusal to "write to the Market". She firmly refused to change a storyline to adjust to the current popular trends, or simplify prose to meet the lowest common denominator, or pad a word count in the name of Industry Standards. To the contrary, her books ranged from a mere 5,000 words, to the more standard 40,000+.

"Each book is as long as it needs to be," Natasja was often quoted as saying, "There's not point dragging a story out into repetitiveness for the sake of a word count, and not every book needs to be thick enough to knock out a small child or pet."

It is a regret of the artistic world that while Natasja Rose undoubtably had more stories to tell, she will not have the opportunity to pen them down.