Before I begin, let me say that Anna's writing I have seen is very very good, and if it took no effort I am lime, olive and emerald green with envy :-) The following comments are only about the way I find the whole process, which is somewhere in between all the views I've read so far.

I wrote primarily for me, true. My B7 focus is character intereaction, and fairly narrowly based - Blake and Avon first (there aren't, of course, *nearly* enough A-B stories in the world) with Vila next and the rest scattered somewhere behind. Simply letting one's imagination run is wonderful fun (not least of all because one can skip the need for rotten plotty bits and simply play with the good stiuff :-)) as is scribbling it down on my hard drive where no one but me will see it - pure and unabashed self-indulgence and nothing wrong with that.

As I've said before, the buzz when someone else enjoys what I've written is wonderful in itself, as a separate thing from the pleasure of imagining the whole thing. But if they're going to enjoy it, they need those things I'm not so good at, they need a plot, they need clarity in the allusions I seem to throw in, they need something other than 5 pages of My Darlings playing complicated word games for my amusement :-) And *I* need it to be at least competent and coherent enough that it won't cover me with mortification <g> something that is not necessary when it's hidden in my head.

The work can be enormous fun in itself, of course - like that 'ah hah!' when you think of a way to justify keeping in a piece of prose that *ought* to be pruned for the story's sake but which you love is nice - but then you still have to get it down in words that - if you do want to share it - someone else is going to appreciate as well.

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