I need to find someone who will read my stuff, make constructive comments, who is not Andy and not charge me the earth to do so.

I read, a while ago, that writing is a lonely business, and that one needs other writers or at the least a couple of decent readers to hang around with and be writer-like with. In my ignorance and youth I scoffed and though this wouldn’t apply to me.

But it is… and and now I’m starting to feel the strain. Somehow it’s not enough just to have my friends smile and say ‘you’re wonderful for being a writer’. At the risk of sounding emo, no one understands me!

I tried looking for writers groups and workshops in the area, but they’re either where I can’t get to them [to quote one site 'Rural Dorset'] or they want to charge me a gazillion quid just for them to turn up and look at my writing.

Andy is insisting that I have a good style and my prose is entertaining, but he hates what I write. It’s very hard to accept criticism from someone who admires one’s art purely from a technical stand point and not for the actual story being told.

I know I’m not the only writer who’s ever felt this way, because every writer’s blog/ site I read says the exact same story as I’m repeating here.

On a vaguely related note, I’m going through one of my ‘I hate all my work, everything I’ve ever done is shite and all I ever will write is shite’ moments. In time, this too will pass, as it always does and I’ll look back and laugh. But for right now I’m in crisis.

Andy came up with a fantastic, grand, majestic, sweepingly epic story idea for me to write. But I can’t do it. Because I am lame and cannot write something that grand, majestic and sweepingly epic despite the fact that I would desperately love to. I just don’t feel I have sweeping epic-ness in me. I’m a short story girl, not a epic high fantasy girl. The very idea he gave me dwarfs my comprehension and quite literally sent me scurrying to hide under my duvet.

Gods, I suck. And what’s lamer is I’m so eloquent in my suckieness.

Blargh.

☮&♥