Omnibus State of the Author · 1:15pm Mar 8th, 2014
Well this will be a somewhat lengthy blogpost, but then again if you have read any of my works you know I can be rather longwinded, so here we go.
What is the state of the author: well, to put it in a word, “contemplative.”
Ever since this story (http://www.fimfiction.net/story/173606/the-conversion-bureau-setting-things-right ) shot up to the tip-top of the feature box (only relinquishing it just as of right now as of the writing of this blog-post. I’ve been, taking mental stock of myself and what I’ve been doing here on FIMFiction for the last two years.
Oh have I mentioned I’ve been on this site for roughly 24 months now *blows party favor*
Back to the main point, I’ve been on this site for two years give or take, and… well I’ve have my ups and downs, to say the least while trying to write. But my mind was never crystallized as much as it was these last 36 or so hours.
Unless you have been living under a rock, or have just never read a story of mine, you would know that most of my stories involve the Conversion Bureau (henceforth referred to as ‘CB’)… metaverse, I guess you could call it. Although the way most CB writers use it, it’s more of a prompt than anything else, but that is another discussion for another blog-post or forum topic. In any case, that is my stock and trade.
And, in most cases, CB stories, have had a rather… tumultuous history here on the site. There is no need to recite the history of CB, because it is long and somewhat complicated. But in any case Windchaser’s Last Man Standing was the story that got me into writing anything period to start with. I didn’t think I could write something that he could have, at least not with the same breadth and impact as he did, but at least I could write something that would garner a little discussion, a little back-and-forth. A little piece of this great and vast fandom I could call mine.
So let’s fast forward two years from March 2012?
I’m sitting in my room trying to figure out what in the blue hell I’ve done with the last two years. The story that has garnered the most attention for me is still the now-renamed Bridging Ages, Bridging Worlds. Which was the first story I wrote, and before I started rewriting it, the only one I’ve actually declared complete.
Sure it and a couple of others have netted me, as of writing, 27 followers, and I thank each and every one of those slightly over two dozen for their bit of support over the Internet, but I still largely sit in obscurity.
And I have to sit and watch the ACB just rack up pageviews and upvotes and forum hits and everything.
Oh sure there have been Anti, well now Alternative, Conversion Bureau stories before “Setting Things Right”, and there will be ACB stories after of varying amounts of quality. But story has really, triggered a sense of foreboding in myself that I simply cannot remember any before it doing.
So I had to sit down and really backtrack what I had been feeling over these last 36 or so hours, and I’ll do it structured along the Kubler-Ross Model (aka the five-stages of grief).
So first there was denial, but it’s not in the vein of which you were thinking. Sure it would be easy for me to say “I didn’t think anyone would really like what amounts to a 9000 word story foundation” and that’s where it started from, but it started long before that. In short, I was patently jealous and envious; but I could not admit as such. Everytime an ACB story would come up and gather up 100+ upvotes, I would just sit and stew and try and pretend that I wasn’t mad. And their stories were getting not only heat in terms of viewcounts and upvotes, but heat in terms of discussion. Now granted a lot of it might look a bit, circle-jerky, but still they were having some kind of back and forth. And I wasn’t. No matter what I tried to write, I just couldn’t… get anyone to talk about it… I was being ignored.
So this leads up to stage 2: anger. So after a couple of hours of just, not believing that story was just racking up upvotes like nobody’s business, I began to stew. And boy did I ever. No it didn’t result in me yelling at anyone over Skype, or typing long screeds about how the author was a retard for pandering to a bunch of anthrocentric nitwits. No this was just palpable, slow burning, internal resentment. That powerful resentment you feel when you start looking for something to blame for yourself feeling jealous or envious of someone else. I wanted to blame the ACB for just blanket upvoting anything they produced internally; I wanted to blame the feature box system for creative a positive feedback loop where anything that gets a bunch of upvotes quickly just keeps getting upvotes like the proverbial snowball down a hill; I wanted to blame the ACB (again) for creating a situation wherein now the only ‘CB’ story that can get popular is one that takes a bat to the straw-piñata body of Xenolestia, as they’d put it. Resentment is a powerful, ugly, and ultimately blinding emotion. I was just furious that the ACB was basically stealing our premise, taking the absolute worst interpretation of it, and then taking turns hitting it with sticks to get the delicious candy known as upvotes. I was sitting there, wondering just what in the hell they were doing… and what I wasn’t doing.
So I briefly drifted into stage 3: bargaining. Oh I was going to write this great and grand post in the ACB forum trying to finally once and for all understand and comprehend their resentment towards the CB premise and all the energy that derives from it. And then I was going to take that and apply it to my own works, and finally, it was going to solve everything. It was going to result in a story that NO ONE could find fault it, because it would have covered every possible angle imaginable. After about 20 or 30 minutes of thinking I quickly realized that, for a lot of them, the premise itself is the problem and no amount of massaging it would absolve that original sin. So long as I was going to write CB that wasn’t structured they way they wanted it, it was going to be a problem.
When I realized that the only way I would avoid that particular point of contention was just to give up writing the premise itself, that is when I slipped into stage 4: depression, and where I remained a lot of last evening (my time). I just moped around at work thinking how nothing I’d ever write using the CB premise would ever amount to anything other than digital marker to myself. No one would bother reading it at this point, the well of goodwill in the FIMFic community was good and poisoned at this point. If I wanted to write anything with humans becoming Ponies for any reason, I basically would have to either go the bog standard route or try and come up with some other justification.
This is where things really kinda started to turn for the worse for me.
It was at this point I looked at the other story I had written, Transcending Equestria. Now granted I have a little bit of writer’s block with it… but it has resulted in little to no attention whatsoever. By this point, I was wondering in all honesty if I was just an awful writer.
To make a bit of a detour to set up a point, consider professional wrestling. When regarding Japanese professional wrestling (aka puro), there is a term that American fans like to use called “Japanese heat”. It is a term that basically means the audience has such ambivalence about the performance they can’t even be bothered to react positively or negatively. And a wrestler that garners no reaction from a crowd soon finds himself unemployed.
That is effectively what I was feeling from the FIMFiction audience over these last two years. That no matter what I did, what I tried to do, what I contemplated, what I planned out: I just couldn’t generate any real sustained reaction from the audience. I would see story after story jump up the Feature and Popular Now box, settle back down, the authors would find a little niche for themselves. But I on the other hand, just kinda toiled in obscurity, never really making a name for myself except for the odd comment on someone else’s story.
At some point in the evening, I honestly contemplated if I should just quit writing altogether. I mean… what is the point in writing if no one would bother to read it.
And that is when it finally dawned on me. I had been spending much of the last 24 hours (at that point) moping and occasionally raging that I was effectively being ignored; that I was, even if I did not want to admit to it, in some part, writing to be ‘popular’. That I was trying to write something that would make people notice me. That I was basically looking for external validation of my own self-worth as a writer.
Which is probably the biggest mistake you could make in my opinion, and I was sitting there guilty of it in various respects over the last two years.
And then when I thought “Well maybe I should give my story to one of the reader groups to look at, surely they could help me figure out if I am doing anything wrong.” Or “maybe if I put it one of the groups for struggling authors they could help me reach some critical mass.”
Then I looked at what the basic premise was for all of my stories save one.
It was all CB. The very thing that had become, over the two years I’ve been here, a poisoned well.
And that is when I realized, why I hadn’t put BABW in the Struggling Authors group, or the I Just Want a Comment group, or any number of sundry groups that are designed to help nurture people who may have talent but just can’t breakthrough.
I was, and I guess still am, quite simply, completely afraid of what would happen if I did.
If resentment is a corrosive feeling, then fear is a paralyzing one.
I was afraid to ask for help out of circle of not-ACB CB writers because I’m deathly afraid of what they would say to me if I did.
I had basically developed a massive inferiority complex about my own writing.
I had let myself get jealous and envious of the ACB being able to garner more heat than I could. I was resentful that they had taken a premise I loved and twisted it to a point where most people now probably wouldn’t recognize it. I was fearful that if I tried to get help for, or promotion of, my own CB work, or just my work in general, it would fail utterly and I would just reinforce the notion that A) the premise I am writing for is just fundamentally poisoned to the point you can’t write about it positively and get any kind of respect from the audience, and/or B) that I myself am just a poor writer and I would never be anything other than an also-ran.
At some point I had lost the thread of why I was writing. I was trying so hard to prove some point to people who honestly would never care, that I forgot the number one rule of writing, especially if you are writing a subject some may not like: write for yourself.
Ultimately I have to stop crouching in fear that if I try and put myself out there, and I would get slapped around by the larger commentariat. That if I need help writing something, then I need to get help writing something. That if I want to be recognized for what I write, instead of chase trends and pander, then I need to just get over myself and do the thing.
So that is why I’m in a contemplative mood. I am trying to figure out how to stop sabotaging myself due to my anxiety about what I am writing and who I am writing for.
Thank you to whomever may have read this…
Personally I like your work.
1906986 thanks, it really does mean a lot to me
1909476
Your Welcome
I also enjoy your work, when I fist got on fimfiction.net I didn't have an account so I couldn't favorite it
. Later, when I went looking for Conversion Bureau: a new age, a new life to see what ever had happened to it and, I couldn't find it,
which saddened me, because I genuinely enjoy that work, and know that I have found it and it is being rewritten, I plan on taking a gander at your other works.