Love Spanks weekend is officially over. It was fun and slightly insane and highly educational.
Among other things, I have learned that I am a control freak.
I probably already knew that, but it really hit home to me over this past weekend.
I think that one of the reasons I self-published was that I didn’t want to lose control of my work. Where does editing (other than grammatical stuff) become someone else’s voice instead of the writer’s? (I struggled with that in a creative writing class, too. Just because that was how the prof thought it should be written didn’t make it right.)
And that’s why, if anything I write ever becomes a movie, I want to write the screenplay and have final say in everything. It’s my vision.
(Over-possessive? Maybe. But I can’t shake the horror of Bladerunner from my mind — it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the book that it was supposedly based on, and I don’t want anything like that to happen to my creation.)
That is also why I’ve been leery of having guest posts on my blog: I want to be in control of the content.
Yep. I’m a control freak.
This whole Love Spanks weekend brought it fully into focus, though.
I love Ana dearly — she’s a great person and a terrific author. And an incredible organizer of awesome events. (Seriously! She should give classes in organizing online events.)
But…
(Yes, there is always a “but” isn’t there?)
I discovered that I am even more possessive of my blog than I had first thought.
Possessive and territorial.
It was bad enough that I was posting the Love Spanks logo which was totally outside of my genre and the image (brand) that I am trying to build. I don’t mind stepping outside my genre (it’s good for a writer to get out of his or her comfort zone) but the intrusion of foreign objects into my blog space was far more difficult for me to handle than I had expected. (See? I told you it was educational – I learned something about myself.)
(It wasn’t the “sexiness” of the picture that bothered me, by the way – it was the spanking part. That is so far out of what I write that it might as well come from another planet.)
And then came a template for the event.
Four hundred fifty words that aren’t mine and that don’t relate at all to what I write.
Four hundred fifty words that belong to someone else before you even get to mine.
I wanted to cry.
I wanted to blow something up.
I wanted to flip tables and rage quit.
But I didn’t.
I put them there and I hated myself for doing it.
(And I promised myself that I would work on getting a second blog up: an erotica blog, a blog that more closely matches the theme and brand of the event, a blog that won’t be as intensely close to my heart as this one is so that the next time – if I get invited back for another event – I won’t go through this again.)
At the time, I felt like I was selling out, although now that I’ve had more time to think it through I realized that I wasn’t – what I was doing was following through on a commitment of sorts.
(Granted, I had no idea when this started that I’d be putting someone else’s pictures and words on my blog, which is why, when I do a science fiction and fantasy blog hop thingie later this year – probably in May – I’m going to have stuff available as options/suggestions/ideas, but not as requirements.)
So, yeah, I’m a possessive, territorial control freak.
Which leads me to a question for other writers out there who may be reading this:
Am I the only one who feels like this or do others struggle with the same issues? If you do, how do you deal with them?
And if I am the only one, why doesn’t it bother anyone else?
Novel Notes 