Why I Write

I write for myself first, and my read­ers first and a half. Er, it works out, I promise. I am a rabid, mostly unapolo­getic review whore; luck­ily for you, I also like to gab crit­i­cally about my fic, and am in this busi­ness to improve my writ­ing as well as share it with others.

I write what I love to read. Fave authors include Lois Bujold first and a bunch of other fab­u­lous authors sec­ond, Scott West­er­feld, Robin McKin­ley, David Abra­ham, and so on. I hope to write some­thing that lasts and is fill­ing and *sat­is­fy­ing* to read; some­thing that takes some­thing out of you, that demands effort of you, but not so much that you can’t curl up and *rest* with the book in your hands. I don’t know if I’ll ever be there, but that is my goal.

I write all the time, because I love doing it. Or, I should say, I invent all the time. I am con­stantly peer­ing at my char­ac­ters, adjust­ing their makeup, pok­ing at them, drop­ping them into all sorts of hypo­thet­i­cal sit­u­a­tions, and all because it is great glo­ri­ous fun. Actu­ally shov­ing stuff onto a page is just as fun, only you actu­ally have to work at it, and it is work as well as fun. Some­times it is the eas­i­est thing ever, and some­times I feel like I’d rather shoot myself than look at a sen­tence again. But I keep doing it any­way, because I find it fun.

I write with other people’s char­ac­ters. Because that, too, is fun. I’ve never got­ten round to post­ing my (mostly incom­plete) orig­i­nal fic because of sev­eral rea­sons, and I sup­pose one of them could accu­rately be called being lazy. But what’s the point of being hard­work­ing when there’s already a story you want to write, a hard story with some stuff that you didn’t have to make up and some stuff you had to make up because the story wouldn’t make sense oth­er­wise? I say there isn’t one. I also say I want to fin­ish my hard, close-to-hand story first, and that if that ends up tak­ing till I die, it is quite all right so long as I had gobs of fun along the way.

Which, because writ­ing is fun, because writ­ing with other people’s stuff is fun, is kind of a given. For­ever and amen.