Random Thought on Writing and Reading

[Edited because of technical difficulties.] My family had a good time at Worldcon, and my head is still buzzing from being on great craft panels, and meeting writers I admire. Hopefully I can write a few things about that when life settles down a little more. But something I wanted to get out of my head: In talking about fiction writing we say a lot about the reader. The reader, as E.B. White once put it, is much in the news. The reader needs this. The reader wants that. You will win the reader over if you do this. You will lose the reader if you do that. All this is fair and well-intended. But it misses something I tried to say at one of the panels, that actual flesh-and-blood readers (as opposed to the hypothetical construct we call "the reader") are every bit as idiosyncratic as writers, and if you're going to seek feedback, seek it from more than one person. More to say later, but I'm having trouble with formatting and will need to sort that out.