I was born in 1981 (so was 39 when this profile was last updated), grew up in Southampton, but now live in a remote hamlet in Somerset, next to a field of llamas and a wood full of bats and tawny owls. I love my partner, bad puns, long walks, sunrises and rainbows and sundogs (which are a sort of reverse rainbow) and sky special effects generally, amateur dramatics, and, obviously, books and writing stories.

I’ve been telling myself stories and chatting to imaginary friends since I was three years old, which may be part of the reason I didn’t make many friends at school. As an adult, I try to be a bit more sociable, but I still enjoy having imaginary conversations with characters from my favourite books and web-comics – or, better still, introducing characters from different stories to each other.

I think fanfiction is underrated. In past ages, areas of mythology – such as the Trojan War, or the reign of King Arthur – were shared worlds in which anyone could set stories, either using conventional protagonists like Odysseus, or making up new stories within those worlds. The fanfiction I enjoy reading ranges from missing scene interludes through AU scenarios (what if Mary Bennett had married Mr Collins; what if Darth Vader had survived Return Of The Jedi) to bizarre crossovers (the characters from Order Of The Stick are pupils at Hogwarts).

My favourite writers include Lois McMaster Bujold (in whose works I have written a few short stories), Jane Austen and Terry Pratchett (whose works I can't even begin to imitate), and Shakespeare. My favourite webcomics include Freefall by Mark Stanley, Darths And Droids by the Comic Irregulars (predominantly David Morgan-Mar), and, just recently, Order Of The Stick by Rich Burlew.

I wouldn't call myself a Star Wars fan, probably because the Miles Vorkosigan books fill the space-opera shaped gap in my life that Star Wars does for a lot of people. I'm more interested in books than films, and when I tried reading a few Star Wars novelisations and Extended Universe novels, all I could think was, 'This would be so much cooler if Lois McMaster Bujold had written it.' On the other hand, I do like some of the Star Wars fanfics that I have encountered on this site, and several non-canonical works inspired by Star Wars, including the Origami Yoda books by Tom Angleberger (the adventures of a group of schoolchildren and their origami Star Wars puppet alter egos/imaginary friends) and Darths and Droids (a webcomic imagining that the plot of the Star Wars films is a role-playing campaign). I like the way that both these series play with the relationship between fantasy and everyday life.

Crossovers I want to write:

Miles Vorkosigan/Red Dwarf. Rimmer has spent his life trying to become an officer. Miles has spent his life trying to prove he's worthy to be an officer. Considering that they've both died, maybe it's time to move on?

Crossovers I don't feel able to write, but wish someone would:

Miles Vorkosigan/Discworld. A sequel to Vorbarra's Terrier by Tel-Writing: Sam Vimes (who has been renamed Lord Vorbohn by Emperor Ezar) prevents the Escobar War from happening. Now he and Aral Vorkosigan need to work together to find an alternative solution to the problem of Prince Serg.

possibly followed by

Miles Vorkosigan/Discworld. After failing his Academy entrance exams, teenage Miles puts his skills as a budding detective to good use by working for the Municipal Guard, where he becomes fascinated by the young officer he is working under. Captain Ironfoundersson comes from a remote village in the Dendarii Mountains whose inhabitants are as short as Miles, and would be considered muties if they weren't all so strong, healthy and long-lived - and yet Ironfoundersson is two metres tall, has hazel eyes and looks strikingly like Emperor Gregor. Also, everyone knows that Miles's new friend Constable Uberwald, first woman to join the Municipal Guard, is actually Lady Angua Voruberwald, daughter of a school acquaintance of Lady Alys Vorpatril - but why are there all these rumours that the Voruberwald family are muties, and that Angua's brother murdered their sister for not being a mutie?

not to mention

Miles Vorkosigan/Star Wars

In the course of his covert ops duties, Miles needs to team up with Han Solo and Chewbacca. This is awkward, not only because Miles is jealous of Han for being the sort of tall, strong, good-looking guy who always gets the girl, but also because Han has a grudge against the Vor. Having been educated by the Imperial Service Academy but then cashiered for disobeying an illegal order, Han is bitter that Miles, who had taken part in a mutiny in very similar circumstances, had got away with it, because things work very differently if you're the son of the Emperor's right-hand man than if you're some random orphan from the Caravanserai like Han. The fact that it was Miles's father who had given Han his training on disobeying illegal orders just adds insult to injury. (As the Vorkosigan universe doesn't have sentient aliens, and the alien life it does have doesn't resemble Earth mammals, I expect Chewbacca is a genetically engineered life-form made from a mixture of human, ape and bear DNA, and that he probably began his life as a slave on Jackson's Whole.)

I also write original fiction, and have posted some of my stories on https://www. fictionpress. com/u/1120152/Temple-Cloud These include a completed novel, Fourteen Reasons Why Not, about a suicidal teenager trying to find reasons to stay alive, and a fantasy novel, After The Battle - Or, How To Be A Human, about a wizard who has lost both his magical powers and a large chunk of his memory discovering that he is a were-dragon. I have recently started a sequel to How To Be A Human, called How To Talk To Shadows.

I write non-fiction on a blog from time to time, generally when something moves or irritates me. If you'd like to follow my blog, you can go to https:// templecloudsomerset. blogspot. com/

Apart from my favourite writers on this site, I love some of the writers on Archive Of Our Own. My favourites there include:

a_t_rain A university lecturer who writes excellent Vorkosigan fanfiction (much of it focused on Donna/Dono Vorrutyer, Byerly Vorrutyer, Ivan Vorpatril, and the Arqua family), many stories inspired by Shakespeare, and a crossover series in which Severus Snape time-travels to 16th-century Denmark and becomes Hamlet's court wizard.

avanti_90 Writes Vorkosigan fanfiction, much of it AU (including at least three different AU versions where Aral is forced to become Emperor), Tolkein and Star Wars fanfiction, and lots of crossovers (the One Ring is found on Barrayar; the crew of the Starship Enterprise find a wormhole route to Barrayar and evidence that the planet has been infiltrated by Klingons; Cordelia Naismith is a Jedi knight and Aral Vorkosigan is believed to be a Sith; etc). The last mentioned is the only Vorkosigan/Star Wars crossover I have ever seen (apart from my very brief attempt here), and I'm amazed that there aren't more.

I would also recommend E H Smith's trilogy of Harry Potter/Vorkosigan crossover stories about Snape's time-travel-fuelled friendship with the Vorkosigan family: Marks and Scars, Without Enchantment, and No Great Magic. These were on The Bujold Nexus when I first read them, disappeared from there, were posted on FictionAlley, disappeared from there, and are now back on FictionAlley again. They may keep being moved from one site to another, so it's best to look them up on a search engine if you can't find them.