It depends

Hopefully, if you share your story with the RIGHT people, you end up with higher pressure in your tires when you're all done.  Indeed, this is the very purpose of Red Room......"as iron sharpens iron."  Of course, you don't just want any old schmoe to take your tire pressure.   Hopefully, most of us here aren't too swine-like....ir is that "swinine?" 

I am ever grateful for my brutally honest local  writer's group, Camprobbers, which, alas, has somewhat disbanded.  They were merciless with my writing on the operating table, but at least they used a sharp scalpel.  And they didn't leave any stray organs lying on the table when it was all done. 

 One sometimes hears advice like "Don't take critiquing too personally; it's your work that's being critiqued, it's not a personal attack.  You need to learn to separate the two."

Well, fat chance.  Any book WORTH reading (or even critiquing) is going to to have a lot of you in it.  If you CAN totally excise yourself from your writing, it's a job, not a calling.  Everyone here can immediately smell a book that's the product of a job rather than a calling.  We don't need more of that; life's too dadburned short to produce it OR read it.

 The wonderful thing about critiquing as opposed to ordinary surgery, is that once you walk off the operating table, you get to pick up a scalpel of your own and return the favor.

When I finally came to the realization that if my writing sucks, I suck, two interesting things happened.  I began to suck less, and so did my writing. 

As human beings, there certainly is a lot more to us than what sloshes out of our inkwells.  But since our writing is the main portal from our being to our doing, it had better be good.

I have a chapter in my treatise "The Spirit of the Craftsman" entitled, "Surprise--you ARE what you do, after all!"

If you can't BE your job, you need a new job.

Well, enough of that epistle. :)

eric

No WAY everybody! Make your own!

My family and I just sat down to a pre-dinner SNACK because the gingerbread smelled too good. Hot out of the oven. Fuck the whipped cream, who needs it.

Jessica, this is DELICIOUS. Even my husband, who sneers at gingerbread, was in heaven, licking every crumb from his fingers. This is the real thing, lady. And it bodes well for your book, which I'm sure is just as scrumptious.

As for me, I only let out little bits of a work in progress too... a "thesis" or "teaser." Because really, even though they're asking, "so what's your book about," they don't really want to know. They might want to read it, but hearing about it is not reading it.

Okay, back to the gingerbread!

THANK YOU for sharing.