Writing meme and thanks

[louiselux]

This meme is popping up all over the place today, but taken most recently from gehayi:

Ask me any one question about my writing, then post this in your LJ, so I can satisfy my curiosity about yours.

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alarielle - got your card and fic! They're both brilliant - thank you. 

daegaer - guess what got here a couple of days ago?  Yes, the errant Christmas parcel!  I'm so pleased. I shall duly fill the notebook (pink pages!) with gay porn written in shaky train handwriting. I haven't had a chance to look at the cd yet because my ancient, creaking pc is resisting playing it, but I shall take it to work and try it there. And new manga! Demon Diary is very cute.

Comments

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

A writing question!

What do you consider your most successful story (for whatever value you choose of the word) and why?

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

There doesn't seem to be any easy answer to this.

I love some of my stories with an irrational love. Others I think they worked well but I don't love them much at all. People often most like the ones that I'm least sure about.

People often respond strongly to those stories where I think I've crossed a line into emotionally manipulating people, like Salt Water Tides and Imperfection. The odd thing is, those are two stories that I love hugely but at the time of writing I was thinking that people were just going to laugh at the angst. This wasn't the case and left me thinking that maybe I could afford to be a bit looser with my emotions in the things I write. That might sound odd, but I know I tend to approach big emotional moments in an oblique way.

Time Under Glass has been quite successful and I'm proud of it in a distant sort of way because it's the most carefully plotted of any of my stories and the fisrt one where I got utterly sucked into the writing process. I don't love it though, partly because I can see all the things wrong with it. It seems to have some longevity though, which I'm pleased about.

Baby Snakes is something that people seemed to love, and still do. For a throwaway story it made a real hit with people and that impresses me. I do love this story because it was so easy and so pleasurable to write.

Early Light is a story I'm proud of, because writing it was nightmarishly hard and in the end it had a really good reception.

After Midnight, Under The Trees I love massively, just because it's them and also it's got the first proper sex scene I've let people see for ages.