Current mood:	confused
Current music:	Tanita Tikaram - Twist In My Sobriety

White Flags and Glass Houses
I admit it: I'm defeated. The idea that people don't want to hear that I liked their fiction confuses the hell out of me, so much that I can't even conceive of writing feedback any more.

I know what I said before, but honestly I'm not interested in doing mini-betas every time I sit down to read a story. I hate doing regular betas, and now I'm supposed to do this with feedback? The mind boggles. Why do I have to be responsible to the writer? I just want to read for the pleasure of it, and talk about the source of that pleasure. Why do I have to pause and point out a thousand flaws? I don't read work that has a thousand flaws; I discard it, bored and annoyed.

My writing is getting all tangled up in this anxiety about what other people want or like, too. I don't want to care what people think; I want to write for pleasure, even if that's a masochistic sort of pain-tinged pleasure. Not that I don't want to improve, but that's the point of soliticing solid betas, of engaging in onlist writing discussions, of reading articles on the writing process, all of which I do.

You know why I really hate it? It's the power that people wield when they assume they can criticize me. They elevate themselves and knock me down. I don't want to be anyone's fucking puppy. I'm very much a pro-active writer, and being reduced to a curly-haired lapdog for some egomaniacal bitch just doesn't sit well with me.

It all comes down to "People in glass houses..."

But instead of actually writing something, I took these quizzes about what kind of a writer I am.

It's funny--some people told me that I must hate my characters when I make such bad things happening to them. But it's actually quite the opposite; the more I love a character, the more I enjoy to make them suffer. And I do have humor in my stories--only it's mostly black. But I compensate it with lots of erotica.