User blog comment:Kolpik/Snouse in My House/@comment-28266772-20180906162335

I like snakes. They're weird to the touch but otherwise I'm not bothered by them. I don't think snakes are too played out in horror. Animal motifs are rampant in horror literature, and snakes have some qualities that make them fantastic choices. They're universally recognised, live in just about every biome on Earth, are predatory and have a very simple appearance that is, for the most part, unique to them. I especially love the use of snake motifs for the villain in Conan the Barbarian, and his transformation into a giant snake is a really awesome sequence.

I have no experiences to share, although we occasionally find dead ones. The UK, as an island, has very little wildlife that wasn't eaten to death sometime in the last 2000 years. But we do get grass snakes and adders. I recently had to pull my dogs away from an adder hiding under a lot of dead leaves. They're hardly dangerous to humans, but there's a good change they'd kill a medium-sized pet.

And finally, regarding your PS, I think the simple truth is most of those people are children. I am startlingly aware of the fact that a vast chunk of people I interact with online are in their teens. And it's my job to impose upon them the sad truth that for most of us, a good story is the product of months, not hours, of work. They can be very annoying, but they are ultimately just kids.

Or possibly very stupid adults. I'm not bothered either way.

But knowing when to finish a story, or to keep working, is hard. There's no right answer. Some stories, like The Shimmering Tree, I wrote in hours and it's easily one of my more popular stories. Others, like Cuculidae or The Garden and The Squirrel, took actual months of workshopping with other writers and didn't so much as raise an eyebrow. I guess the only thing we can really trust is our own judgement, and the deep down knowledge of whether we tried our best or just did the bare minimum.