Surprised this morning to discover that what looks like more or less random paragraphs extracted from the first couple of the stories I'd written for Tori's STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS have started floating around the net, and suddenly got a real insight into how artists must feel, having worked themselves into an exhausted frenzy, gone without sleep and and racked up a bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars recording a new album, mixing it, getting it into a form they are proud of, only to have everyone's first exposure to it be a badly compressed 56K mp3 of a premixed version released to a couple of journalists...
If that's how the artist wants it released, fine. But if not, I dunno -- it's like a strange sort of race between curiosity and respect, and, knowing human nature, curiosity will always win, and always be disappointed.
Not, I should add, that I spent thousands of dollars or went without sleep to write the SLG stories. But I had always thought that people's first exposure to them would be as a sequence of 12, in the correct order, to be read or heard in combination with the photos they refer to, and in context of the songs.