And that's not looking at how sometimes what I like to write is not what I like to read, which kind of puzzles me. For the most part, my best stories (in my own opinion, and in reader reaction) are those which I really wanted to read myself - but there's been a few I really was driven to write, that are not the sort I'd usually like to read. (I like to read them when I've written them myself, but that's because I engage differently with my own writing...)

The divide is not that great for me, because I read as widely as I write. (I actually don't relate very well to the idea of only reading or writing one kind of story -- I can definitely see having a favorite kind, because I do, but ficcers who only write stories that cater to their kinks and only really seem to have one kink ... I recognize it as an equally valid form of fanning, because we're all in this to make ourselves happy, but I don't understand it very well.) It doesn't surprise me that I'd sometimes want to write a bleak death fic, or a bit of porn, because even if it's not always what I want to read, it's sometimes what I want to read. (I am rather glad that I never finished and posted anything during my Very Bleak Porn period last spring/summer, though. People might have fled my journal in droves!)

But I do relate to writing a bit differently than reading, and I find some things easier to take when I write about them than when I read them. Being in SGA fandom almost exclusively for so long has skewed my head a bit, too, I think, because it's a fandom that's so monoculturish about certain things -- this is not a fandom that supports much dark fic, for example, unlike somewhere like SPN or (from my outsider perspective) SV, where it's practically a genre unto itself. And I think the absence of darker/bleaker fic in the fandom makes me want to write it, as opposed to a fandom with a lot of dark fic where I can indulge that urge at any time by just going out and finding myself a nice bitter deathfic.