Our internet connection at home has been down pretty much all week, so I've been getting some reading and writing (and even a little bit of art and homework) done. Getting stuff done on the train, too, yay.I'd talk about what I've been writing about, but the new icon pretty much sums it up for me, so you probably don't want to know. (Scary-prolific though, for me: over 3,000 words in thirty-six hours, just on one story!).

In flist catch-up news, dduane is going to write her next wizard-cats novel as an online serial. Basically, under the ff.net model. (Okay, she's actually basing it on the way Lawrence Watt-Evans did it, but still.) I've been saying for ten years that the internet is *made* for serials, with online comics, blogs, and fanfic WIPs to prove my point, and the idea that professional serial novels may be coming back through the internet is filling me with *glee*. (So is the prospect of another cat-wizards novel, of course.)

I wonder why it's considered perfectly acceptable for these pro-SF writers to say 'this much money in the tip jar or I won't write the next chapter!', and not for fic-writers (and to some extent webcomics authors) to say 'I'm not posting the next installment unless I get this much feedback!'. After all, it's basically the way that *all* professional serials work, back to the days when Rennaissance philosophers would try to get people to subscribe to their Great Works In Progress, and have to go back to shilling for the nobility if subscriptions dwindled off. Is it because demanding feedback comes uncomfortably close to the fic-taboo of asking for payment? Is it just a general conception that we should be writing for *love*, darn it? Is it because, somehow, only *real* writers and artists are allowed to to that? Is it that we the readers have such a sense of entitlement that we're offended at the mere idea that we owe something to the writers? Or is it just because the people who demand feedback are usually highly annoying people in a variety of other ways?

I've never really objected to writers asking for feedback, or even saying they won't finish a story without it. Me, my relationship with feedback is such that one effusively complimentary review can cause me to hide from all publicity for weeks, but it makes sense that writers would want to write the stuff that people are actually reading, and in many cases, feedback levels are the only way to tell. Leaving aside the fact that feedback makes authors happy, it ought to be good for the readers, too. A writer's time is limited, and if it's a choice between finishing the epic that nobody cares about or starting something else, and maybe better ... why should she be expected to finish just so that she doesn't look like a feedback whore? Why do we even want her to finish?