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::grins:: I have a few pieces up here in serious need of revision, which I will get to soon, I hope! Some of those have reviews with some seriously good concrit, and I intend to use that to clean up the stories in question. Do I love it when people like what I write, and tell me? Of course I do. But I love it when people take the time to give me a detailed and well thought out review. I love to know what worked and what didn't. I'm no kid, but that doesn't mean I don't learn every single day, and that I can't try to improve every time I sit down at the keyboard.

Please no spankings for using necromancy on this thread. I've been writing slash for a long time now and I am female. Honestly, I don't think it's gender that's the problem but inexperience. Especially where it concerns slash writers who read yaoi/shounen-ai manga as gospel. Many of those comics are poor examples of the male perspective as well as sexuality. I think a lot of slash writers need to put down the manga, close their fanfic book marks, and do some research. There is endless amounts of info on the Internet if you look for it. ...and just an addendum for the sake of being ever so slightly snotty and pretentious: Maybe it's not a matter of women not being able to write from a male perspective. Perhaps it's just a matter of not being able to write from any perspective but their own narrow one. When I write, the gender is always secondary to the character's personality.

What about us women write sex scenes between two or more males? I have read a lot of m/m fiction written by women(from Dreamspinner press,Loose ID, Torquere and so on). The story I have in the archive is m/m. Do you think it changes the game since the largest target audience for these stories are women? I am sure there is a male audience, and some of my fave authors on these sites are men. But from what I have seen, guys usually hit publishers that have.. Hmmm, how to say it? More of a raw appeal to their works that the average m/m loving old lady perve like me(Well, not me personally. I like the raw stuff ) would find distasteful. So is it a question of the authors perspective or the authors audience? Or, did that even make any sense?

I heard quite a zinger on this topic (broadly speaking): "The current dictum, to 'write what you know,' has produced an entire generation of novels about college professors having midlife crises and affairs." I think writing only from a perspective one is familiar with, or drawing only from one's own experiences, breeds stagnation, not creativity. Imagination (and research - gasp!) are key to finding those perspectives exterior to oneself.