The Sound of Silence

I was quite tempted to call this post 'Bloody Bollocking Hell!!' (my favourite swearword, caught from a charming Londoner) because I'm angry and disappointed, or even to write one of my sordid fairy tales, but I decided otherwise.

So, in advance, sorry about the growl.

Over the past two years (at least!), I've been warning the readers of what one of my other literary incarnations creates that if they didn't say a word about my works, the plot bunnies would die. 

It wasn't an empty threat to get more reviews, it's really that silence was killing my plot bunnies, and now silence did kill the bunnies. 

I still have ideas (Shannon, your bunny is still in the run; I'm working on it, but you'll be the only one to ever read it), but the will to type something that won't even get a smiley as a review/comment is completely gone - all the more since I now have original bunnies that are loud and demanding (my Sci-Fi stories are beginning to look good, and original, and quite promising, but they're time-consuming).

About a year ago, I did some maths based on the numbers of comments and of hits on a certain site counter, and I ended up with an incredibly low percentage of reviews compared with the numbers of readers.

As I wrote in a prior post, I never expected long letters or love declarations when I posted a new chapter, but when you do post on a site with a counter and you see it turning, but you get silence, it hurts. For other kinds of works, you do expect silence, but for others, comments feed the plot bunnies.

I feel quite bad for the handful of faithful reviewers who stayed with me and reviewed most chapters (I'll tell them where to find this "new" me if they're interested in my style and ideas).

What made me blow a fuse is a handful of people who had never taken one second in MONTHS to contact me, who now write: 'Oh, don't leave, you're good.'

Couldn't they encourage me before? Apparently not.

Well, Lanor's got a lot of work to do, and things must have been meant to happen that way, but, hell, it does hurt a bit.