Please Feed The Muse

It can sometimes be difficult, as a writer, to get your family and friends to read your story while it is still a work in progress. Mine tend to say things like 'send it to me when it is finished', or 'I am so snowed under with work', or 'I'm suffering from a specific kind of leg pain which means I cannot possibly use my eyes right now,' or 'is this ANOTHER zombie one? Can't you write something else?'

Usually I try to be as polite as possible about this - after all, there are only so many different angles on a zombie story that one ordinary person can handle in a short space of time - but my frustration built to epic proportions last night.

Me: I'm going to send my story to you. It's a zombie fairy tale.

Cublet: (tapping on her iphone) Oh... good.

Me: I'd like your opinion.

Cublet: (still tapping) Uh... sure.

Me: I'm serious. I need to know whether the general audience gets where I'm going with this.

Wetsoks: Buddy, she's not going to read it.

Cublet: DUDE! No, you're right, I'm probably not. I don't have time.

Me: Don't give me that, I know you read a ridiculous amount of fanfic. Would it help if I changed all the names to Harry Potter characters to ease you in?

Cublet: No. I don't care about anyone except Fleur.

Me: Then I'll change all the names to Fleur. That's going to get confusing.

Cublet: I'm probably still not going to read it.

Me: I am appalled. You read the entirety of Chauvinistic Coquette!

My dear readers, to spare you from the horror of this particular fanfic, daringly entitled Chauvinistic Coquette, I will give you only a brief summary. Don't go looking for it, I beg you. It is a 100k+ word count story between Hermione and Fleur, full of bad spelling, bad grammar and bad taste. It features such incidents as Fleur throwing Hermione through a glass window, 70 storeys up, and then while Hermione is falling to her death she has time (it was 70 storeys up after all) to realise that Fleur did this because she loves Hermione so passionately. I know when I love someone, I also have an uncontrollable urge to throw them through a window. Damn these spindly otter arms.

Incidentally she doesn't die, because of 'magic'. Don't even try to make sense of that. There is also a horrific public incident with a banana, which is almost exactly what it sounds like, and many other moments which made me weep in despair and beg Wetsoks to stop reading it to me. Eventually, out of kindness, she did. We never finished the story. I am still afraid that one day she will somehow trap me in a box and continue reading until the end. There may or may not have also been a sequel. I can't even bear to think about it.