Introspection time!

So there's this thing I ponder all the time, and I never seem to come to any conclusion. What makes a person want to respond to another person's writing?

In my experience, there's two kinds of people: people who write fan letters/comments, and people who do not. I completely confess to ten years of lurking online before I started telling people if I liked something. (Even now, I dither about dropping little/not so little notes when I read and enjoy something. I don't do as much as I'd like, but I'm getting better.) I, personally, worry about getting rebuffed, which is ridiculous, I know. I feel like I'm...intruding, I guess, even if it's only to say "hey, that was really great!"

I admit to frequent bafflement over what stories of mine garner lots of attention and what ones do not. I know that some of that depends on where I've posted/what fandom it is, but still. I mean, I know when I like a story I'm writing/have written, but how much I like it doesn't always jive with how much other people seem to. Example: the Hanyou's Prayer. I liked writing it, I had fun with it, but I didn't really feel it was my best work. And yet...there was a lot of fuss over it, a lot more than I'd ever expected. (Not that I don't want fuss, because fuss is good and shores up my fragile, writerly ego. XD) A story I really thought I did well (Hostage, a short Weiss fic) just kind of disappeared out there. I'm personally quite satisfied with it, but knowing whether or not other people liked it makes my satisfaction more...well rounded, I guess.

Writing is a mysterious thing. A person writes, sends it out to a nebulous audience in a nebulous, far away out-there place, and sometimes the audience gets vocal about it. I can only guess that other art forms work like this too.


And now for something (almost) completely different.

I'm going to be incommunicado this upcoming week, so I'm scrambling to finish off that scene of my fair lady!saiyuki that I've been poking away at for the past week. I want to be able to post it before I go. So far, I've got four pages and then some. I've got a bit more to flesh out, and then maybe a quick paragraph of background/plot to sketch out so that people don't get too confused trying to draw comparisons between this and the canon MFL.

~later!

Closer and closer to bathtime madness!

In the meantime, a completely unrelated paragraph about Hakkai. (It's almost a drabble, even, depending on if you're being really strict and saying a drabble is a hundred words, no more, no less.) It's kind of word vomit-y, but I like it anyway.


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He thinks if he cleans hard enough, cleans long enough, until the skin of his knuckles is scrubbed away and he can see his reflection in the paved stone kitchen floor that maybe, just maybe, he can turn back time and she'll come walking in the front door and they'll be happy in their little house, together again. And he knows it's probably a sign of insanity to think such a thing, but he can't stop hoping. Even though what he's really doing is penance when he scrubs his hands raw with harsh soap and his back aches and his knees have gone numb as he kneels with the floor brush, even though it's really her blood he washes away. It comes back, dripping on the floors, sprayed on the walls. Painted on his hands. So he cleans. And cleans. And cleans.

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I've got a little more to do (read: actually put in the actual bathing part) before bathtime-fun-my-fair-lady-gojyo will be ready for its debut. I'm thinking it'll be done as early as tomorrow afternoon/evening.

~later