Sally Field Moment

I'm not going to go all "You like me, you really like me!" on you, but I am over the moon that folks seem to like Ember, which is running as part of The Serial over on Bam's site. I really wasn't sure. I mean, I like it, but I generally tend to like what I've written for about a month after writing it. With a little distance, I start to notice the flaws--though even then, I'm not sure of my appraisal because I tend to be really hard on myself.

And it's not like I get all that many outside opinions on my stuff. I'm pretty secretive about my writing. To the best of my knowledge, exactly 3 people have read Ember in its entirety--and I've never met any of them face-to-face. You have no idea what a huge step it was for me to accept the opportunity to place a story on a high-traffic website like Bam's. Of course I jumped at it, but I was so nervous. And with the exception of the opening scene, the only people I've ever shown Like a Thief in the Night to are the editors at Samhain Publishing.

Obviously, I have issues. Issues which I really need to get over if I want to keep up with this writing thing.

I don't talk about my writing, I don't pass it around to friends and family asking them to read it. Actually, I don't even show it to friends and family when they ask to read it. The way I figure it, my loved ones will feel compelled to say something nice, even if, say, they usually don't like or read Romance, Fantasy, or Sci-Fi. End result: 100% of the people to whom I've dedicated my stories have not read those stories. Granted, one of those "people" is the supercute solar-powered Maneki Neko on my desk*, but the other 88.5% of those people are: my husband, my mother, my sister, my father and my best friends.

My mother reads all of the genres listed above. But who wants their mother to read stories they've written that have S-E-X in them? Eew. I'll hand my stuff over to my sister any time she asks, but she's a teenager, straining under the required reading of her college courses, and the last thing I want to do is give her another book she feels like she has to read. The toughest one is my husband, who thinks Romance novels are silly, and tends toward non-fiction and sci-fi stories with male protagonists. He's asked to read my stuff a couple of times, and I've put him off a couple of times. If he doesn't like books like mine, why would he like mine?

Like I said, I have issues.

So I'm thinking I need to get out, get together with some other writers, take a class, stop being so damned secretive--something! Because I don't like the phobia thing. It sucks to be so nervous about something I love so much.

*Yes, I really do have a story dedicated to my solar-powered lucky kitty. It's so cute!