If you are following the "Broken Rules" discussion on SheWrites please read:

This is great—and this discussion is precisely what women writers need to have about our own work. Hooray for the struggle. The battle here, polite as it is, is between the need to get attention for our writing (remembering that Flannery O’Connor said, “Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me you are indifferent to being heard… the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has its end in its audience”) and the need to be part of a community where we support the writing of other women (remembering that Virginia Woolf said women writers have so little tradition behind us “or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help”). It’s true that on a bad day of writing that LAST thing I want to hear is that even my best friend from third grade is now going to be on the NYT’s Bestseller List, in O magazine, Esquire, and NPR’s Morning Edition.

But then again I’m practically grotesque in terms of my need for approval and also superstitiously greedy when it comes to begging for support if I stumble upon some good fortune of my own.

Here’s the deal: maybe we need to make sure that when we ARE the recipients of good news, good luck, and a payoff for all our hard work (and reading randomly around the site it’s clear how just hard every woman works on her writing), we pass it along and make it easier for members of the community to get some good news of their own.

A good party, after all, is where everybody can celebrate.