A Goodreads user asked David Erik Nelson:

I know that you are an award winning SciFi author, as well as the writer of DIY books. Which type of writing gives you the most satisfaction? And why?

David Erik Nelson That's tricky. I've been mulling this over, and have mentally drafted about four or five answers, none of them satisfactory and all of them sort of disturbing. This answer is no different than those, it's just the one I'm committing to.

The shortest answer is "Writing DIY is ultimately most satisfying." Part of that is a function of commerce--I write DIY projects that have a clear path to the light of day (either in a book, or on my blog, or for a specific talk/event), while I write fiction that only very slowly wends its why to the public (the submission/rejection cycle for short SF can be *very* slow, and publication even slower; a story I write today is likely three or more years away from publication).

Part of it has to do with the functions of these kinds of writing in my life: I write SF in order to sort out personal moral quandaries, and I write DIY in order to share fun projects. This inevitable leads to another complicating factor, which has to do with the lifecycle of written things: When I write fiction, that story dies with submission to a publication. The piece lived in my head, and sorting it out and pinning it to paper sorta tends to render it inert, like a taxidermied animal mounted in a case. Yeah, the results can be fascinating or neat or beautiful or admirable--someone can love the resulting story, and experiencing it can be very meaningful to them--but just like the wolverine in the display case, it's not a live animal anymore; it's a skin stretched over an armature and posed amid some plastic leaves and hunks of log. Meanwhile, the DIY stuff is *born* when it hits the printed page: Folks start picking those projects up and doing their own weird things with them. The street finds its uses, and breathes life into the inert thing I handed them. It's like the DIY projects grow up and get married and move in with other people, and that's sorta great (in, yes, a clearly weird way).

And this sorta winds around to maybe the real reason I'm most satisfied by DIY. When push comes to shove, there are really only two ethical things you can do with writing: You either increase someone's joy, or decrease their dread. I see the DIY projects increasing joy--folks are thrilled by them, and thrilled to make their own things, and to discover they have the power to do new crazy things. Meanwhile, my stories that succeed are the ones that tend to fill folks with dread. Yeah, the stories can be funny--in an admittedly gallows-humor way--but they're dark. Maybe there's value in that--I see readers and reviewers write things like "this story disturbed me, but really got me thinking"--but, still, I feel weird about that, and a little embarrassed. It would be hard to categorize that feeling I feel as "satisfaction."

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