Thanks for your responses

[scarfman]

The reason I asked about that Creative Process cartoon here is that it came up on Twitter in that discussion I had with Scott Kurtz about fanfiction that bled over a few days' of my mirror posts.

I pointed him to that cartoon in hopes of bolstering my argument that fanfiction is an end in itself and a true life purpose to me, where he can't conceive that fanfiction can be anything but a stepping stone to something else or merely a hobby. In the cartoon I characterize my fanfiction cartoons to qtrhorserider as something that made me happy before AKOTAS and as being something I look forward to devoting my whole energies to again once AKOTAS is done. This apparently wasn't explicit enough for Kurtz.

A few hours after tweeting to me, "I found your comic where you talked to yourself [sic] compelling and relatable", I saw him tweeting to someone else doubt that you can "look back on a life of ... fanfic and feel fulfilled." When I saw this comment from Kurtz, I tweeted, "Nnngh, Scott, at it again. Didn't I just convince you I look back on a fulfilling life of fanfiction? Why won't she? Or did I?" (As I noted parenthetically in the mirror posts at the time, replies to other tweets aren't mirrored.)

Kurtz replied to me, "Convince me? no yo didn't. You just wrote a sad comic about NOT being fulfilled!!!!"

At that point I rather blew up at him [EDIT Kurtz appears to have deleted all his side of that discussion, somehow taking with it a lot of my replies to what he deleted], culminating in apologizing for not being clear since he apparently had not understood anything I'd said for the previous two days.

Which in turn made me wonder whether the cartoon in question communicated what I meant it to communicate. Kurtz obviously missed the point I intended entirely. But I did wonder whether the cause of that was his own bias or was dialog that was more ambiguous than I had believed when I wrote it. And that's when I asked you to give me your reactions.

The reactions I've gotten haven't, really, suggested that "I look forward often to the days when triangle fanfiction is my primary creative expression again" communicated unequivocally that I feel triangle fanfiction to be my life's work and just short of being a holy crusade "fulfilling". If I hadn't already apologized to Kurtz for being unclear (even if it was the tail end of a rant), I would feel obliged to do so now; but fortunately I don't feel it's necessary, because I really don't want to reopen the can of worms.