Finishing Up the Fey

[rolanni]

It is, by the way, snowing here in Central Maine.

 

From the mailbag: Why didn't you stop writing?

And the answer to that is -- you know this, surely? -- Steve.

Possibly missing fact: I was lead on the Fey books; Steve was writing the chapter-a-week for Fledgling and then Saltation.

Continuing the story of why I didn't quit writing:

I was in moderate hysterics, having come home from a bad day of secretarying, to find my mailbox full of mail hating on the Fey. Steve had hauled me to the kitchen table, poured the wine and said, "Tell me."

And I told him: I told him that I loved to write but I couldn't take the hate and the screaming and people telling me I was a pervert who wrote bad porn, and how dare I sully their eyes --

And he said. "So, are they bad books? Did you cheat? Did you deliberately write badly?"

And I kinda laughed right there and said, "Honestly? What bugs me the most about the porn comment is that it's bad porn. If I'm gonna write porn, it's going to be the best porn you ever read. And no, I didn't cheat. They were hard -- you know how hard they were -- but I did my best by them."

"OK," said Steve, "so what's bothering you is the hate mail. Don't read it."

"But we always answer mail from our readers."

"Forward it to me. I'll deal with it."

"OK..."

"Anything else?"

"Well . . . I'm afraid I won't be able to write anything, because I'll be afraid of being screamed at."

At this point, I believe the glasses were refreshed.

"We got into this because we wrote for each other," Steve said. "And we said we'd stop, if it wasn't fun any more. If it's not fun any more, tell me. We don't have to do this."

And I said, "Let me think about it."

We finished the bottle, as one does, and a couple days later, I started to write a story for the next SRM chapbook, and forwarded all my reader mail to Steve, who probably had written a script to send them immediately to trash-and-delete, and -- here we are.