Work

Phooey! If you’re any kind of artist, don’t ever sit around moaning that people don’t care about your work. They DO care, but don't know it. If you have done quality, fine quality and you use the right mechanisms to get your work out there, people will be glad to experience you. They are hungry to be delivered from the maudlin by you. The problem is never your story, the size of the canvas you used, nor your colors, nor other people. People are hungry for fine furniture, but there can be NO extraneous saw-cuts visible. You’re an artist? The competition is many and mighty. That's the exact first thing to know. You can’t work too hard. That’s the second thing to know. There is an alternative, that I've experienced a number of times with reading short fiction to groups. I have gotten eaten alive by their adverse reactions and I am sitting there and listening to their objections and slumping under the load and then, about their objections, I have to tell them, "I knew that. I thought the same thing," but, fact was, I just rushed the story out there out of some kind of frustration with the sheer WORK of trying to get the story to really gel. But they spotted my extraneous saw-cuts.