telling you how much I've loved reading your fic this year

Thank you! It's a pleasure to know you've been reading. And I'm grateful that you're willing to read some Snape, too. I know what a struggle it can be to read characters one has no affinity for, even if the stories are well-written.

Thanks, too, for your thoughtful comments on literary "indulgence"; they really got me thinking about what it is I want my stories to do and what it is I look for in my own fanfic reading.

First, I do agree with you about the power and effectiveness for tender moments. I love them myself, and definitely, they are a large part of what makes a character compelling for me.

It's just that I have a (probably excessive) fear of being overly-sentimental in the bad sense of the term. (Too much modernist influence or something /g/). I want love/tenderness to be meaningful in some way, and I've read too many fics that just wallow in melodrama or in romance at the valentine-heart level of emotion. They cease to be "real" in any useful way.

I want so much to make sure that my writing doesn't get cheap in those ways that every time I put in a soft moment, I worry that I'm going to far. So it's not the love/tenderness per se that I find a problem, I guess, but more the handling of them.

Luckily, though, I have excellent beta-readers who help me keep things in perspective, so I think I'm mostly able to retain those touches of necessary humanity without becoming maudlin or too sweet. In any case, the sort of moments you mention in "Trainspotting" and "Storytelling" seem to be endemic to the way my fic-writing mind works, so I don't see them disappearing any time soon!

Thanks again for the great comment.