I sold some words!

[psocoptera]

So, hey: 335-word flash fiction professional sale to Daily Science Fiction. (Which is... haha... the first money I've earned since leaving Seahorse in '08...)

Beasts and Roses

Comments

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

THAT IS AWESOME!!!!! Well done! Is it already up yet, or forthcoming?

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you!! It is up - actually went up a couple of weeks ago, I've been having waves of "maybe I'll just never mention this" because my brain is *so helpful* like that. But, you know, do the scary thing, so better late than never. :)

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I SAW that, and meant to ping you at the time. Congratulations!

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Neat that you saw it out there in the wild :)

[ursula]

Neat! Congratulations!

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Congrats!

Also, I liked it. I'm always weirdly drawn to non-romantic (or at least really different) takes on Beauty and the Beast.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Glad you liked. :)

[gallian.livejournal.com]

I saw that and was so impressed when I noticed the by-line!

Congratulations!

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! How "Lady and the Tiger"-esque ;-) Should we be speculating about the merchant's choice in the comments here, or is it intrusive to impose our interpretations on the author?

For selfish reasons such liking your writing and not sharing many fandoms with you, I would like to see more original fic from you, although, obviously, you are free to ignore me on this point.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I would like to see more original fic from me too! We'll see. :) You should feel free to speculate if you have speculations? Anyways, thank you!

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Well, firstly, I should say that this is all my own attitudes and therefore I don't mean to impose it as the correct answer. It's just my answer. Maybe particularly of note is that when I think this through it is from the point of view of a child who lives far away from her parents; I don't know if that means that my thought process is different from that of a parent who is considering their children.

Anyway, the decision can be broken down for me into two questions:

1) Which mirror is better to have?
2) Should you choose to keep the better mirror or the worse mirror?

The second question is more straightforward for me; I have a strong moral intuition that if you're making a choice that affects both you and someone else, and you have a say in it and the other person doesn't, you have at least a strong obligation to consider making sacrifices so as to avoid imposing hardship on the other person. I think the reason (it's an intuition, so I have to work out the reasoning after having the intuition) is because at least, if you make the sacrifice, you're doing it having thought it through and autonomously consented to it, whereas if you don't make the sacrifice, you're forcing the other person to, which isn't as fair. That doesn't mean that you have to accept the sacrifice if it's too burdensome for you to do it - just as I believe that, while we are obligated to do our best to help others, it's morally legitimate to take one's own needs into account to - but it does mean you have to seriously consider it.

So then there's the first question, which mirror is better? Which is obviously a tough question, or else the story wouldn't work ;-) I can't give any sort of objective answer, of course, but in the end I guess I feel that the gold mirror is the better one to have from my perspective, at least. The reason for that is that neither mirror allows for two-way communication, which is obviously superior, but at least the gold mirror gets you closer, since you can see and hear the other person as well as being aware of your own responses and reactions. The silver mirror is communicating into a void - the gold mirror prevents the other person from knowing how you react, but at least it's still two-way in the sense that you have someone else to react to. So it offers a bit more, as much as it still doesn't offer. I guess it's like the question of which I prefer, reading or writing (that is, in traditional contexts, not in the more instantaneous communication world of the Internet), and, as many pleasures as writing can offer, reading seems to be my clear preference. In writing you have nothing to react to, you're just putting things out there without having any idea of how they'll be received, and not only is it scary, it's also difficult, since you're not playing off of anyone else. But in reading there's a sense in which it effectively mimics the things I like about communication as it allows me to react to someone else and to feel like there are two sets of ideas and thoughts in the conversation.

So that's what I'd choose, at least. The gold mirror is better, and it's a sacrifice not to take it, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make on behalf of my loved ones, so I'd keep the silver mirror and send the gold mirror to my parents.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

And like, yeah. That sounds terrible. My parents could die and I'd never know. Or who knows what else could happen, and I'd always be in the dark, uncertain, completely unaware. And then there's the huge burden - and it does feel like a burden - of having to keep going back and talking into the void without knowing how my words are being received, committing to always thinking of things to say with no one there to prompt me, not even knowing if anyone is hearing me at all - it's all the things I really hate about writing, the reasons why as much as I wanted to be a writer in the past I had to eventually give it up. Uggh. So much nicer to have the gold mirror and know and not have to talk without knowing how it's being received.

And yet, precisely because I can't impose that burden on my parents, that's even worse, knowing that I had done that to them and they had no say in the matter and I placed my own ease above them without considering their feelings. . . that's precisely why I think it must be the right choice.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

This is so neat and I feel honored that you took the time to have these thoughts and share them with me! This is an interesting moment for me because I feel like if this was fic I would reply with telling you stuff about what I was thinking, but somehow the writing-for-pay context is making me ask if I should be mysterious instead, the author is dead, no one wants to hear from the author. I mean, not that it's a big deal either way, I just hadn't thought until right now about this being something that might feel different.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Well, I appreciate that you wrote something that was thought-provoking!

It's semi-fascinating to me that the meta-conversation we're sort of having about the appropriateness of readers responding to writers or writers responding to readers almost mirrors my thought-process around the mirrors - like, should this be a two-way conversation, what's the difference between an experience where a person sends a story out into the void and gets no direct responses and one where she sends the story out and the other person responds, or the difference between an experience where a person reads a story and has responses to it but doesn't get to communicate them and possibly hear more about them from the author versus one where she does.

One thing I kind of like about the Internet is the way that it does seem to facilitate more communication in the arts - like, when I read TDL I was able to easily write to SRB and tell her how much it had meant to me, and get a response from her, and that was kind of cool. And I've posted rather elaborate interpretative comments on Hitherby and gotten direct responses to them, and possibly even had a slight role in inspiring a particular Hitherby entry that I happen to find incredibly personally meaningful (at least, it involved a particular character after I had made very detailed comments on that character and how much I liked her), which is a bit scarier because it involves interpretation but is also kind of cool. I think the author is dead in that if a reader has a certain response to a story, the reader has validly had that response to the story even if it's not what the author intended, but maybe in a sense it actually helps to decentralise the author if we use communication to highlight the collaborative aspects of meaning-making in art?

[amyprime.livejournal.com]

Sweet!

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[q10.livejournal.com]

ooh! congrats!

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

NICE!!!!!! :D

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[sofer.livejournal.com]

Congrats! I liked it.