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

[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?