Yuletide reveal! And a question

[amatara]

First and foremost, wishing you all a wonderful New Year! May you be granted enough wishes, great or small, to fill your daily cup of happiness, yet still be left with plenty of others to keep you dreaming in years to come. [Poll #1506013][Poll #1506013]

Comments

[mithen.livejournal.com]

LOL, I don't quite know how to react to that - for some reason I have this feeling I should defend myself, either about the lack of sex in other fics or the sudden presence of sex in this one, or possibly both. :)

No, no, neither at all! I love your stories without it, those almost-with-it (oh, "Small Mercies"), and those with it. :)

That pacifist speech is awesome! :) And Dan likes UST just fine in his stories--he betas all of mine so is capable of enjoying a pretty decent range, although when he's reading he tends to skim sex scenes, lol... (I find a lot of people skim explicit sex scenes, including myself unless I'm in just the right mood and the scene is written just right!)

[amatara.livejournal.com]

You know, I keep finding it so very funny that you write the steamiest sex scenes yourself (and write them wonderfully, too!) and yet mention skimming away from them when reading someone else's fic. :) Not that I can't understand your point perfectly, because I do, but - I keep having to smile when you say that. *giggles*

I love that your husband reads and betas your fic! I let my own husband read some of mine (though so far, not the ones containing sex *g*) and he liked them well enough, but I know he does it more because I'm asking, than because it's really his thing.

[mithen.livejournal.com]

*facepalm* I hear you about the sex scenes. As a writer, I find them an interesting challenge (like fight scenes!)--plus I can be sure that the sex is always interesting to me at the moment I'm writing it. As a reader, the odds that someone else's smut is going to hit me in just the right way exactly when I'm reading it is a lot smaller. Not the fault of the smut at all, just a sort of narrowness of the parameters as a reader...

It actually took my husband and I a while to find a balance with him as a beta. Because I really was hoping for more enthusiastic involvement, but he approaches stories very much as logic puzzles, with a real detachment. He is just not a squeeing sort of guy. That made me kind of sad at first (this is a polite euphemism for "I locked myself in the bedroom and cried") and for a while we had this elaborate system where he was required to find at least one thing per thousand words that he could compliment as working on an emotional level. But over time I kind of came to understand that he didn't see stories "on an emotional level" the way I did. I had to learn to value his sort of intellectual appreciation of the plot and writing style and not expect him to be like, "That moment where you had X say Y, it ripped my heart out." :)

This has become quite a ramble! Sex scenes and betas will prompt long-winded discussions from me every time. :)

[amatara.livejournal.com]

Well, sex and betas are very meaningful aspects in a fanfic writer's life, aren't they? ;) So I don't blame you a bit!

I guess most guys are not the squeeing type when it comes to fanfic - my husband's the same as yours, anyway. :) He can read and enjoy the stories, but he usually doesn't comment much except for a brief "scene X is fun" or "oh, this is a sad ending." Not exactly "scene Y ripped my heart out", either. *g* But to be fair, I don't think I could bear to have him beta a fic of mine. Not because I'm afraid of what he'd say, but because writing is a very private thing to me, and for some reason, the closer someone is to me, the harder I find it to receive critique from them. If that makes any sense. *blinks* And I think it's a wonderful thing that you did manage to find a way to let your husband beta that the both of you feel comfortable with.