Tragedy too easily becomes self-involved dreck, like Prozac Nation.

I agree with you one hundred percent about this, and about how erika's writing is *not* that. With me, my mom has been chronically ill since I was a child, so there's a fascination with/curiosity about morbidity that has always informed the way I look at the world, but it's not necessarily the largest part.

Describing those un-extraodinary incidents to people is interesting. Making an anecdote into a commentary on the world at large is interesting.

This is exactly right, but I come from such a jaded place with regard to finding that audience, since a lot of today's publishing executives want to know what your "hook" or "platform" is.

Your stuff hits echo points in me, and I've never fought in fandom or worked retail. It's right there.

This is very true. I have worked retail, but fandom? Just here and the Beta, and at the tail end of the Whedonverse to boot. But Vampire People spoke to me on a lot of levels. And that's the thing -- sometimes it's not even so much what you write as the voice you use to tell your story. Yours is unique, and very relatable.

Yeah. Ask away.

Is it difficult to discern between people who are being nice to you because they're nice to everyone, and people who are nice to you because it makes them feel better?

I ask because I was thinking about this guy I went to college with who was blind. He was standing at a crosswalk, and I watched while I was trying to take a left. The cars kept whizzing by him. When I took my left I blocked the walk, got out of the car, and said, "you can cross now."

And it didn't really make me feel better. It just made me hate everyone else, more.

And then I thought about how people go out of their way to give you stuff, like the guy with the drawing when you came to visit. It seemed like that wasn't so much for you, but to make him feel like he did something nice for someone. And I wondered how often that happens, and if it makes it harder to separate out the genuine people from the clowns.

So if you had felt good would it have made you one of the clowns?

No, if I did it solely to make me feel good, or out of a sense of pity, it'd make me a clown. Blocking the crosswalk was about the student, not about me.

Yeah. It is hard, that's why I think a true friend is the one who'll confront me when I'm being stupid. That's why the whole Bitches kerfuffle thing confused me so much, because my experience with humoring is so...different from others' To me, that would mean that they didn't trust me enough to be honest, what she was asking... that we carefully consider every word. Doesn't mean I love being flamed, but empty praise is all too easy for me to get. Which is also hard when I send work out, am I talented, or Special?

My problem is always the wrestling with arrogance. I'm never sure if what I'm writing is interesting or just navel-gazing, because I'm writing for my own amusement and not anyone else's. Sure, I want other people to read me, but that comes from the same place as wanting someone to join me for lunch. I'll tell you a story, and then you tell me one. It's a social exercise in that I want to talk to people through the keyboard, but I feel incredibly self-conscious that maybe I'm just talking AT people. Like a blowhard in a bar.

But that's self-correcting, that worry. If you aren't interesting, people won't want to read you. An agent won't want to represent you, or compare your voice to Sarah Vowell's. A massive chunk of this conversation, going back a good long way, wouldn't be taking place. And since we do want to read you, and your agent does want to rep you and does compare your voice to Sarah Vowell's, there's the answer to that worry.

And BTW, navel-gazing is NOT intrinsically boring. It's only boring in the hands of an inept writer who can't distill enough to share.

The example I always think of is "Roger and Me". Because nobody ever said "You know what I'm in the mood for? A movie about the collapse of a town after the departure of the auto industry." But Michael Moore had a story he wanted to tell, so it ended up being, imo, a great film.

erika, that's it. And the inverse is also true, I think: someone who doesn't know how to tell a story, who can't distill in a way that raises echoes, can take the most compelling story on earth and turn it into Yawnapalooza 05.

Been there, read that.