Honestly, I don't know the exact answers to the questions I posed in the previous post. I learn what I'm writing as I go along. My novels are giant meditative exercises: dialogues with my psyche.

I'm really happy as a writer when I contribute to someone else's contemplation of "whatever" by making them think. I like making people laugh, cry, or get horny, but I really really like making them think - or so I tell myself: sometimes when you make people think, they get angry, and I don't like that aspect of it... It's all part of this crazy, pretentious :) concept I have of art. I do believe that first and foremost a story should entertain; but I feel compelled to push it to that next level.

I might have posted this before... Bertolt Brecht (a famous playwright) once said (and I'm paraphrasing w/o the actual quote here) that Art is not a mirror; it is a hammer that we can use to change reality. I believe he meant that we can use art to make people think about bigger issues and thus change perception and influence the future. Art is a form of communication for me, a way to reach out and touch other people and create dialogue and shape or influence thought. I think that is the calling of the artist, to reflect upon and then portray reality through the lens of their unique self so that it casts new light on things people might take for granted.

And then I go off and write in the M/M historical romance genre. No offense to all romance readers, but romance novels in general are not exactly known as havens of lofty intellectual idealism. So I should have known better. I should have known that not all readers of this genre were going to appreciate my deviating from the norm and trying to poke them with a stick. But I did it anyway because I think that the genres most ignored by the literary world are the ones most in need of intellectual idealism. And, as an artist, I am fascinated with the exploration of gender, the dynamics of sexuality, and the question of what happens after the couple fall in love and have to ride over that hill into the next day. I want to start where most romance novels end...

Yet, knowing I am fighting an uphill battle, my muse - that fragile child of my creativity - still gets really frustrated when we see comments that the first book didn't have enough sex in it... Or Christine was badly written because she changed in Will's limited perspective... And then I lash out.

I know I am only seeing the response to my work from a very vocal and publicly-opinionated minority. But since that's all I see, I have this tendency to project my frustration on everyone reading my books. And, of course, like most artists, I can read fifteen reviews, fourteen of them singing my praises, and one cursing me, and I will only remember the bad one. That's one of the known curses/afflictions of being an artist... And that idea that "you should get a thicker skin" is utter bullshit. If we had thicker skins we wouldn't be artists...

So anyway, I apologize for engaging in equine necro-sadism (beating a dead horse...) here and through other public forums and private conversations about those frustrations. I need to quit whining and have faith that there are a bunch of people out there buying up these books and "getting it", and appreciating it because there was something there for them to ponder.