But I just got a *lovely* compliment from a friend of mine, who said on Twitter “CE Murphy is wonderfully unkind to her characters, and you understand why they’re making this mistake even as you get that it’s a bad idea.”
That is by far one of the nicest things anybody’s ever said about my writing. :) The understanding more than the unkindness, I know I’m awful to my poor characters, but it’s so nice to see that the motivations are making sense. Clarifying motivation in characters does not come easily to me (I am not all that introspective myself, and “It seemed like a good idea at the time” is generally as far as my awareness of my motivations go), and I’ve worked hard on it, and now I am all full of hearts and starry eyes. <3 <3 <3 *.* :)