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]

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?