u/No_Wasabi_8809

This is a weirdly specific anxiety that nobody warned me about and that I've now heard mentioned, quietly, by enough writer friends that I think it deserves a proper conversation.

I'm writing in a genre where sex scenes are basically expected, and my mother reads everything I publish. My father will eventually skim it. My aunt was at the launch of my first book and bought four copies. I do not want any of these people to read me writing the word "thrust." I especially do not want them to read me writing it well.

But here's the thing. If I write the sex scenes badly because I'm imagining my mother reading them, I'm failing the book. The reader who picked it up because of the genre I'm writing in deserves a real scene, written with the same care as every other scene. The reader hasn't met my mother and shouldn't have to suffer for my discomfort about her existence.

I've mostly solved this by, when I sit down to write those chapters, very deliberately not thinking about anyone I know reading them. I write them for an imaginary reader who picked the book up off a bookshop table because the cover looked good and has zero relationship to me. It works most of the time. The morning after, while editing, I still sometimes have to physically push the awareness of my mother's eventual readership out of my head.

I don't have a real takeaway here. I just think it's funny and a little sad that this is part of the job and nobody really talks about it. If you also write in a genre with sex and you also have family who reads you, I see you. We're all silently grimacing through the same chapter

i write fantasy
epic-ish, secondary world, the whole thing and i'm tired of being in general writing communities where every craft conversation is calibrated for literary contemporary fiction and then fantasy is treated as the genre that needs special handling, mostly the worldbuilding thing, got lotta ideas but can't have a back n forth

i don't want a sanderson fan club, i don't want a worldbuilding-only space (i have enough worldbuilding for ten lifetimes, what i need is help making it land on the page). i want a discord with serious fantasy writers. people who care about prose AND about magic systems. people who read widely in the genre and outside it. people who'll read a chapter and engage with the actual story instead of telling you the prologue isn't allowed.

posting this in few communities to find a tribe
if you're in one, please share, pardon for the grammar kypads won't stop spamming '.'

i write fantasy.
epic-ish, secondary world, the whole thing. and i'm tired of being in general writing communities where every craft conversation is calibrated for literary contemporary fiction and then fantasy is treated as the genre that needs special handling.

i don't want a sanderson fan club, i don't want a worldbuilding-only space (i have enough worldbuilding for ten lifetimes, what i need is help making it land on the page). i want a discord with serious fantasy writers. people who care about prose AND about magic systems. people who read widely in the genre and outside it. people who'll read a chapter and engage with the actual story instead of telling you the prologue isn't allowed.

doesn't need to be huge. just real. if you're in one, please share, pardon for the grammar kypads won't stop spamming '.'

I'd been writing for about two years in total secret. Nobody knew. Not my partner, not my closest friends, none of my family. I treated it like an affair. I had a separate document on my laptop with an innocuous name. I closed the lid when anyone walked into the room.

When I finally sent thirty pages to a writer friend of a friend, who'd offered to take a look, I genuinely could not eat for two days afterward. I checked my email roughly every six minutes. When her response finally came back, I was so afraid to open it that I left it sitting there for an hour before I could make myself click.

The feedback was kind and useful and nothing like the catastrophe I'd imagined. But the experience of waiting for it broke something in me, and in a good way, I think. Until that moment, the writing had been entirely mine. Private. Unfalsifiable. The instant I sent it to someone else, it became a real object in the world that could be judged, and there was no way to take that back.

I think a lot of us underestimate how big this step is. We treat sharing as a logistical thing, like finding a beta reader or picking a writing group. It isn't logistical. It's the moment your private practice becomes a public act, and it changes your relationship with the work permanently. You can't go back to writing only for yourself once you know what it feels like to be read.

If you're stalling on sharing your work, I get it. I really do. But the longer you wait, the bigger that first reader becomes in your head, and the harder the moment gets. Send the pages. It's never going to feel ready