Every few years, there comes out a non-fiction book that says that women have to go back to the imaginary myth of what they were in the first place. The most successful of these was The Rules, the authors of which I believe both then divorced. It’s fun for the media who see women as useful for beer commercials, but otherwise pointless. In real life, marriages aren’t about templates of behavior that men and women have to fit themselves into. Real life is messy, filled with hundreds of boring, slippery little daily details like remembering to turn in forms or cleaning the toilet (live like you are dying is crap,) and what you need as a companion to get through those is different for each person.

And as an editor who’s worked with all sorts of fiction authors, including writers for hire, I can say that the same thing goes for writing. Writing is droning drudgery and frivolous obsession, character love and character hate, whether you’re turning out a short novel in hopes of cash or writing a behemoth of tortured prose. Authors are the same the way men or women are the same gender because they are using particular parts of their brains to write fiction, and at the same time, completely different from each other, just as individual men and women are different. There aren’t any so-so’s versus wowzas on books because authors are too compulsive about whatever they’re doing. Even the really prolific, casual, I’m a craftsman not artist making a living type of authors.

So when the “artists” look down on what they see, wrongly, as no-brainer stories and think that those writers are insincere hacks who settled and the craftspeople look down on the “artists” as snooty, egotistical folk who are chasing an impossible dream, they’re both wrong, and succumbing to a dated, mythical idea of highbrow and lowbrow culture that never has really existed, just like the lady with the men in two boxes. Fiction may be written in different ways for different purposes, but whoever writes it, they are equally sick and twisted and will have to figure it all out.

P.S. I agree with the Joss Whedon answer.

Sadly I see this settling for thegood enough quite often in school, some of my friends can’t fathom going through life without a boyfriend, even if he’s a jerk. I don’t really get why, but whatever.

Your brain is not mush and I learned something new today so I enjoy reading your thoughts while you’re on deadline. LOL writers are crazy ARTISTS so it’s all good.

May the nebulous future be good to you, Robin.

Anyhow, if we didn’t spend all our time daydreaming, what would we have to write about? I for one, started out writing down my daydreams, which usually featured yours truly being the awesome heroine of the day! Daydreaming is totally just research, not procrastinating at all! *looks innocent*

And I did it for a book that I feared was “Mr. So-So” when I started writing it, but turned out to be “Mr. Right” all along.