Small Rewards

I've created this journal because after two years of writing fan fiction, I've started writing original fiction, and I wanted to create a space to talk about that. While I could do so on my fanfic/personal journal (on Dreamwidth: lefaym/on LiveJournal: lefaym), I liked the idea of a place that is specifically focused on writing original stories (to the extent that anyone's stories are original, anyway) -- a space that isn't all cluttered up with random squee, ranting, and personal issues.

The name "Lesley Hastings" is a pesudonym -- it has a particular meaning to me, which I won't be talking about lest it reveal my True Identity. The awesome icon that you see above was made by lionessvalenti. The name of this journal, "Small Rewards", refers to why I write. I write so that I can experience a sense of achievement -- ever paragraph, every scene, every story that I complete is like a small reward to me.

I'm not aiming to become the greatest writer ever, although I do hope that my writing will improve all the time. At the moment, I'm writing a short m/m romance story that I hope to submit to Dreamspinner Press for their "Myths and Magic" anthology. I'm not pinning my hopes on getting accepted, but it's nice to have something to aim for. If it's rejected, I can always share it here. If I do share fiction here (which I probably will), I want it to be completely open to constructive criticism -- so if I post something, then please, have at it!

I don't plan to limit myself to writing in just one genre, or to one type of romantic pairing, where that's relevant (and I probably won't even limit myself to pairings -- I'm rather fond of poly groupings too). The story I'm writing now is m/m, but ideally, I'd like my writing to include f/f and m/f too, and hopefully I'll be inspired to write about trans characters as well.

I'd like to do all of this in a socially aware and responsible way, and that's one of the things I'll be talking about here. I'll talk about concerns that might be raised in terms of writing race, class, disability and other groups to which people are assigned for the purposes of marginalisation. I hope I can avoid committing fail in my writing, and if I do, I hope I can be big enough to admit it and to apologise -- and then not make the same mistakes again.

I also want to talk a bit about the philosophy of writing -- for me, it's all about making people happy and bringing them pleasure. This doesn't mean my writing won't be dark at times, but I think the most important thing to me, when writing a story, is that people come away from it glad that they read it. I think that in order to achieve this, writers need to respect their audience. I don't think that the audience should be able to dictate to the writer, but at the same time, I think writers need to acknowledge that once they put a work of fiction out there, if that fiction is successful, then the audience will become invested, and that investment is something that should be honoured, and never disrespected.

So... that's my Grand Plan for now. I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops.