A writer's butter

The bread of a writer is the actual writing itself. But I think almost all writers crave feedback to go along with it.

I've been turning to the Internet with increasing frequency to find out about the authors whose books I love — to hunt down their other works, find out what they're working on, and just be curious in general. But it never really occurred to me that this meant I could probably email them while I was at it, instead of the previous cumbersome process of finding the mailing address of their publisher and writing an actual letter, which adds gravity to the process. You wouldn't write an actual letter just to say, "Hey, that was a pretty cool book," right?

Anyway, recently I actually took the time to send notes to a couple of authors who are electronically published, and thus eminently reachable by email. I was in correspondence with one anyway (more on her story another day), and the other wrote a great article on the passive voice that I passed on to someone else in lieu of my own impatient explanation. The latter also has one of those lyrical writing styles that I am obsessed with (I found the article by looking for more of her stories), and I decided that good nonfiction and fiction deserved acknowledgment.

(The funny thing is that I'm up to my armpits in critiques to do, so I nearly started making critterly remarks on their works. I settled for more generalized glowing comments.)

I'm only pleased when someone likes one of my stories, so I'm hoping other authors feel the same way. I think from now own I'll make the effort to reach out and tell them about their works that I've enjoyed.