Love the encouragement, hope for more "good for you" pills, and just had to pay respects to the under-acknowledged underground of review-writers...
Shibboleth's Aeon (8/30/05): ... I'm going to be very frank here ...
NovelT: Thanks for making me take a step back and actually look where I'm going. Have a (probably very non-unique) tendancy to get lost in my own overly-flowery prose (), which of course then makes even me cringe a few weeks down the road. Am trying to keep in mind that simple is beautiful (something I truly buy into), but it's an ongoing (and, I fear, more often than not losing) battle.
Trillian4210 (9/6/05): ... I suspect, and I haven't checked your bio, that you are male, yet you write the women very well ...
NovelT: That line, believe it or not, inspired this page (always wanted to reply to reviews, but couldn't find a "nice" a.k.a. non-story-disrupting way of doing so in As my bio contains an informative 0 lines of information, you might not end up too enlightened, but I'll let the cat out that I am indeed female, and not unhappy about it (). It remains however that your comment is amongst the biggest compliments I have ever received, because I am a firm believer that the best people are neither blatantly "male" or "female", just people. For some strange reason feminists will probably lambast me for, it always flatters me to hear that my work can be considered as from either camp.
JDRVJonas (2005-10-02): When's the next update? ...
NovelT: Insert standard excuses regarding the start of the school term etc. In my experience that either inspires lots of escape-writing, or cuts it down to a miserable dribble. As one of those weird people who actually love their jobs, you can imagine which I'm guilty of.
Anyway this spiel isn't quite as pointless as it seems -- I was and am wondering if my writing style has persisted in being incomprehensible enough that people take a glance and think "reading this will probably be 'good mental gymnastics', but ugh let's not bother". Given the (relative?) lack of comments it may be that my "select audience" is so select as to consist of one (or two, depending on the much-tested patience of my beta).
While yours truly is solidly in the camp of those who claim to write for their own pleasure, it remains that if the species wrote solely for such, there would only exist scribblings on some dusty margins. Thus endeth my plea for some indication, however brief, on whether or not to quit embarassing myself by actually permitting said scribblings to air.