Writerly Ways

A real one even. Prejudice in readership. Granted as a writer, there is nothing you can really DO about that but it's something to consider. We had a discussion in the author's list this week that was more than a little irritating. I knew that the prejudice existed out there but I never gave it much thought when I was choosing my author names (and I'm not about to rename myself now). I SHOULD have just gone with initials but I've seen people bitch about those too.

I will admit as a woman, I DO worry that I write men well. THere are definitely times you read something and you know without looking the author is writing cross gender but that's not as common as it once was so this prejudice of "I'll only read a male hero if a MAN wrote the book" and vice versa is infuriating. I don't think I make my males too female. Some men DO cry (witness the guy at the shelter who started crying a little last night when I did). Some women don't cry etc etc. It has never occured to me to NOT read a book because it has a female protagonist but a male author or vice versa.

I'm not even getting into the damned if you do, damned if you don't conundrum about race. I'm not sure there is a winning situation there.


Another topic to mull on is the idea of patterns in your writing. I rarely read two books back to back by the same author but I made an exception this week and instantly picked up on a pattern. Two different series and in both the aunt betrays the heroine and nearly gets her killed. It's like hmmmm. Do I have patterns? Yes. I've mentioned them before, the insane woman and the abused young man. Why do I have this pattern? No clue. But I have stories going back to the late 1980's and those two character types are in them. The novel I wrote in my junior-senior year in h.s. has them and the abused young man is abused by his insane sister (so it had incest, necrophilia and the young man had a parasite twin, partially visible in his chest. Yeah I've always been THIS messed up. The real question is why didn't the teacher send me to the counselor?)

It's just something to think about. I would hate to have my writing be predictable.

Speaking of which, for the holidays I'm willing to send a free PDF of my holiday story (m/m erotica, werewolf!) to a few people in exchange for a review on goodreads and/or amazon. Drop me line if you're interested. It's @ 8,400 words.

Yearly word count- okay I DID up it one last time

213169 / 215000 words. 99% done!

Soldiers of the Sun (yes I'm still working on that nano)-

54021 / 70000 words. 77% done!

Thank you

Thanks everyone for all your kind words yesterday. It really meant a lot to me. So again, thank you, much appreciated.

In fandom new, in case you missed it,I broke down and did fandom_stocking Find My Stocking Here And send me the link to your stocking. I am feeling very uninspired with the ones I saw so if I'm going to do a bunch of them, it should at least inclue my actual friends!

And while we're on the topic of the holidays, if you want a holiday card from me click here. Even if I sent you one last year PLEASE comment again so I know you're interested and that I have your addy. Don't trust me to actually have a copy somewhere and if you have a similar exchange up, point me to it. if you'd rather not give out your addy you could pm me the email you use for junk and I can send an ecard.

Here's my 6 sentence sunday offering which has a snippet of the story I offered up for review earlier.

And who wants to join me in Belgium? I want to go to this in the worst way. Fantasy themed Ice fest

I accomplished very little today other than to get the clothing changed around for the season. I overslept because I didn't get any sleep. Ugh. After the night before you'd have thought I was exhausted but now. I was still awake at 3 AM and woke up every hour.

It's rained so much that my solar panel holiday lights have been dead for 2 days and it's supposed to rain for at least another 2 more days. Whee.

And have a little Kanda in his usual position (he's next to the computer box)