I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that.
This is terrible, when a writer is bored by his own work, but it was a real bomb and had reached the point where I couldn't even stand to look at it any more.
