It's not just me

So recently I finished up a short story called "Incend" and start it on its way to amassing rejections. This story took my five years to write, largely because it terrifies me. It is about the friendship of two boys in a rural Nebraska town just as the Defense of Marriage Act (an act defining marriage as between a man and a woman) was voted in. Because it is a story of mine, there is also spontaneous combustion involved.

What scared me so much about writing it was that I didn't feel I had the right to. I'm not a man. I haven't been 15 years old in fifteen years. I'm a woman married to a man. I was terrified I was overstepping some bounds. How could I write this when the viewpoint is so very much not my own?

So today, on my usual looking at my favorite blogs, Nancy Kress wrote about the same thing, but her issue is a dwarf. I'd hug her, but I'd be too shy and if I could open my mouth I'd be fangirled out telling her I love her and asking if she'd sign my tattered copy of Beggars In Spain. As it is, she's a better writer than I am and has been writing a lot longer than I have, so that she worries over the same things is very comforting to me. Can't wait to read Dogs and Steal Across the Sky.

And hey! I have managed a nonpolitical post. Sort of.