Emmie Dee's writing career, starting with her first story, Ronnie and Ruthie, (1999) jumped off to a wonderful start with a tale of loan sharks and hiding. Her style, while stilted at first, using very long paragraphs and a sentence structure that was at times awkward, did not diminish the telling of the story, yet I knew that she had not matured into the writer we know today. Emmie does not post often, taking the time to craft her ideas into a coherent plot line, and although she does it well, she quite often does not adequately define who is speaking, or set the stage with enough description to let us envision the total scene. However, in Blue Nails Emmie blossomed into a first class storyteller.

The introduction to the premise was lacking, and once the story jumped off I found myself re-reading several portions trying to make sense of what was happening. I see this as a major fault, since having to read the first three pages twice, does not portend well for a story. Yet this story did unfold in magnificent ways that used heart rather than sex to enhance the drama. Again, long paragraphs and a lack of participant identification became an issue for me, even as improvement was clearly evident.

Drawing a reader into the story is a trait that I see developing, although I would have preferred the draw closer to the beginning in all of Emmie's stories. The slow rise to the central plot can be deceiving if a reader wants to know what's happening fairly quickly, and it takes confidence in the author to stay the course, and discover the gems within the story.

The naming of characters, central to every story, is up to the author, but having a character with not two names, but three, is confusing, especially if the plot develops slowly, as in Blue Nails. Heart-rending injuries and the interaction of the characters are difficult when there is no forward to relate how a character arrived in the situation, which is what happened. Mark, or Julie, or Annie, all one person, yet how and why did she end up in a dress? We can infer it, but we are not told of the interaction previous to the beginning of the story.

Before 1998 I had never read any TG fiction, even though I am a TV who can pass quite well in public. Then in January of that year I was knocked over by a pickup truck that veered onto the sidewalk. For the next two and half years I was in and out of hospital. In my brief periods at home I started surfing the web looking for TG fiction, just to pass the time while I recuperated. Most of what I found seemed to me to have little in common with the TG experience or even fantasy. Instead many of the stories seemed to be simply wet dreams of gay men, while lots of others relied on magic to put a closure to an impossible situation. A few gems of stories shone out like brilliant stars in a firmament of dross.

And then I found Crystal’s site. The stories seemed to me of much higher quality and far more apposite to the TG community. Early on in exploring Crystal’s site I downloaded Emmie Dee’s story Blue Nails. In preparing this review it was a pleasure to reread this story, which has become a favourite of mine. Here was a writer who could write a complete sentence and who knew what a paragraph was all about, a writer who could develop her characters and round out her plot with real, individualized people. I found it a story with real tension and above all full of compassion. The characters had lives to lead apart from cross dressing and interesting things to do, things that engaged the reader in their lives.

I consider this story one of the triumphs of TG literature, one of the three or four stories that deserve that encomium, fit to be placed alongside Elaine’s The Importance of being Juliette or Ellen Hayes Tuck Saga. This story is the culmination of a steady process of improvement in Emmie’s writing skills. Her earliest story Ronni and Ruthie was way above average but did not reach the excellence she attained later.

The sequels to Blue Nails, while charming and well-developed inevitably lacked the tension to be found in the prototype, though their sequence is important to follow the young people through their senior year in High School in Adventures of Annie and their marriage and the start of their college years in Something borrowed. I am dying to read the next installment of the latter, for it is not yet finished. Emmie is a careful writer who polishes her thoughts as well as her sentences and another episode has yet to emerge.

Emmie has not stagnated in one category of TG literature, but has produced an SRU story, Harry Harriet and another magical one (in more than one sense of that term) in Aw Come on. Her story Perfect Harmony takes the unusual form of an interview between a reporter and a jazz musician. Other stories that deserve mention are Forgetful Francie and Fashion Disaster, both enjoyable stories.

As anyone knows who has tried to write TG stories there are a limited number of plot lines and the genre confines its devotees closely. In Blue Nails and in Bald Truth Emmie has expanded the possible themes in unexpected directions and done so with charm. One expects little violence and no bondage in her stories; a friend of mine who likes extreme bondage has decried them as ‘nilla, but that is what I like. If, like me, you enjoy realistic stories then Emmie’s tales are for you, with their well rounded characters and their dramatic tension.