Three Cheeses for the Anonymice

Keen's cheddar cheese

This post is a special thank you to my Anonymice.  We erotica writers all have them, people who leave comments but only as 'anonymous', who cruise our work quietly in the night and often leave without a trace.  

Sometimes I see a thread in the Authors' Hangout on Literotica complaining about mean anonymice, who pop into a story, trash it and run off skipping with their tails and laughing.  

From Liverpool's museums website

The anonymice I get on my fantasy romance stories are very different.  They're gentle animals, they probably have large soft eyes with long lashes.  They leave adoring thoughtful comments, thanking me for my stories and telling me they liked the world-building or that they are fascinated by the ever more convoluted nested sets of characters I've developed.  (I suspect romance readers who find something a bit more spicy are likely to go anonymous out of shyness rather than so they can be mean without fear of justified reprisal, so I'm lucky there.)  

The appreciative remarks of my anonymice are what make me carry on writing and publishing my writing.  

A special piece of celebratory cheese, something soft and fragrant - a Port Salut perhaps -  must go to someone who bought my first novel, within a few days of my tremblingly putting it up on Smashwords.  Oh brave soul! at that time, it was a 275K word romance, with just a little bit of sex in it.  (Since then I've managed to get it down to 250K words and packed a lot more sex into it.)  

I recently joined an erotica writers' group on Facebook and the kind but firm comments from other writers on extracts from books I put up there make me realise that my writing needs some serious editorial surgery!  Critical commentary is necessary if our fabulous works of fiction are to get out there to wider audiences.  But the anonymice are vital to anxious new writers who hesitantly put some stuff up, knowing they love it themselves and really just asking, Do you like this too?  Shall I carry on?  If someone whose name you recognise likes your work, it might be because you said you liked theirs, but when an anonymouse says they love your story, you know it must be true.  

Thank you, anonymice!  I will carry on as long as you carry on leaving little tidbits of feedback;  cake crumbs of appreciative critique.  Here is a moist crumbly Welsh cheese for you, a special Caerffili.  xxx

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