There is this nebulae of phantasmagorical opinion (God, where did this vocabulary come from?) about the absolute (I mean, I swear, some phrases that come to my mind baffle even me)...absolute what? Oh, yeah, we were talking about the abyss. So, there is this opinion floating in the vast recesses of writers' minds (I must be on a roll today) that whatever genius prose exhibiting strong literary merit and strong calves (can prose have strong calves?) they produce (today I'm exercising in long sentences) shall be and must be and deserves to be read. Let me repeat it, because I'm sure I have lost you by now. Writers think (see, simple words) that what they write must be read. Or they hope. Or they set out to write with that soul-cleaving wish that whatever they produce will have hordes of readers running to them and begging them for their masterpieces. Can I laugh here, or should I laugh later? You still with me? Well then. 

Yesterday we had a curious discussion on Twitter about whether or not it matters if anyone reads your work. There was a wide breadth of viewpoints, and, interestingly enough, those who have written a lot tended to not clamor for readership, but those who were starting out often shouted that, Yes, readers matter. There was a third, bitter category of older disgruntled writers who said that, How the fuck would they pay their bills if they had no readers? I thought, Hmmm, this deserves a blog post.

This will shock you.