How far can your imagination take you? Sometimes I creep myself out with what I’ve written and I can barely read my own scene. A dread churns in my stomach and I peer at my manuscript as if I’m watching a horror movie. I’ve actually closed one eye and squinted out the other. And it isn’t like I write such shocking things.
An episode of CSI is more twisted than my stories…but yet I feel as if I’ve transgressed…
Of course, nothing was more important to my dad than being good. Bad grades were unfortunate but bad behavior was unacceptable. If anyone else should treat me badly, well, perhaps I hadn’t been nice enough. Well, my writing isn’t nice–for me.
In these novels I’ve attempted, I’ve had all kinds of terrible things happen and I’ve quite enjoyed writing every bit. I take kind and charming and lovely characters and drop them mental institutions, police stations, and whorehouses. Hey, other writers do worse and who wants to read about nice people being nice all the time? Big yawn.
For all I know, anyone else reading my work may find it mild and tame. Well, I’m not out to shock other folks–I’ve got enough going on in every plot to shock myself. Where on earth did that come from? I ask and turn away from the screen, sometimes pausing before writing the next cutting sentence. One time I even got up from the desk and walked away before I managed to type what I knew, I just knew, had to happen next. Then I felt foolish for being so dramatic. Who was I being dramatic for anyway? No one else was there! (To truly qualify as having Nice Girl Syndrome, you have feel obligated to be nice, even when alone–doesn’t mean you always are nice, mind you. You just feel you are supposed to be.)
It’s not like I had a sheltered and nice childhood. I didn’t. But if you’re inflicted with nice-girl syndrome, rattling yourself is so easy.
That’s what other people do, but not me! I’d never…but oh, maybe I would. And here’s the evidence all typed up in the pages of a book–my fingerprints are all over it. What more evidence do you need?
Marta Bacon 
I can relate to the feeling of holding myself to a higher standard than I do other people. The only time I don’t feel bad for putting my characters through horror is when the writing completely takes me over and I have an out-of-body experience. I wrote that scene where Nishari murders the governor’s mistress in a trance, and when I woke up I felt like Nishari coming back to herself with the corpse at her feet. It was really disturbing. Not to mention that it happened at a write-in, and when I looked up. . .there was Austin Java, and my bowl of soup, and Fool and helenathemuse and Enrique. Weird. Just plain freaky and weird.