Mortal Coil Update Thing

So Mortal Coil is coming along well, I've almost finished writing it and it's currently around 249,000 words and 57 chapters long. Clearly my longest piece of work by a long shot, and how many people are currently reading it?

Fuck all.

It has 16 likes and I'm pretty sure most of those came from my editor and proofreader. It has next to no comments or views, even the one guy who PM'd me any errors he found in the chapters, stopped doing so several chapters ago, so as far as I know the only person independent of me who was reading it has stopped. So yeah, needless to say I feel like absolute shit spending my miserable fucking summer away from uni writing this bloody thesis only to have it go nowhere.

That is to say, I felt like absolute shit... then my old enemy Displaced fics reared their ugly deformed head, now I'm just furious. So I came by this travesty today, I saw it when it first came out and disliked it back then. But when I noticed it was the most recently updated story right before mine, I decided to have a quick look to remind myself why I hated it so vehemently (maybe I was in the mood for self harming), and it was the most atrocious piece of shit I've seen in a while. It is the height of bullshit in every single aspect, and yet, because it's part of the Displaced group, a bunch of mindless drones with no standards for quality shower it with likes.

There was a brief moment where Displaced fics were starting to become rarer and rarer, it was a glorious time where I started to believe people here had wised the fuck up... and then there was that stupid site update and now they're back in full force, just as terrible and unoriginal as ever. Because I've noticed something since that bloody update, new stories don't get as much criticism or hate as they used to. Crappy stories are allowed to breeze by either completely ignored or, worse, with a positive ratio, people who used to write critiques on bad stories all seem to have mysteriously vanished into the woodwork. Why is that? Because for whatever fucking reason, people who criticise are treated worse that the shit their criticising to begin with. I can't even remember the last time I commented a proper critique of a story, because any time I want to all I can think is 'it won't matter, the author will just winge at you and his mindless fanbase will just shower your stories with dislikes as part of some petty, immature revenge scheme'. It was a refreshing change of pace to see that someone had actually commented on the previously mentioned story to say why it was so bad, but then I got down in the dumps when I realised... it didn't fucking matter, that shitty author was never going to change a damn thing about his shitty fucking story, and displaced fics would continue to spawn and be shitty while anyone who gave a damn about quality and standards lost hope and gave up trying to change a fucking thing.

So I'm miserable, I'm miserable because something I've put a stupid amount of time and effort into is going nowhere despite the fact that even I (a generally very self critical author) think it's okay.
I'm angry, I'm because stories that look like they had zero effort put into them get praise and attention from people who are too blind to see all the glaring problems with it.
I'm jealous (yes, jealous), I'm jealous that they're allowed to cheat success by throwing their shit into a big vat (a.k.a. the Displaced group) where all it's members flock to shower it with likes regardless of quality because originality is juts a word they heard in passing one, and yet there's no fucking shortcuts for me, I have to update my story twice a week and pray that it will get the attention of just one person before it gets shuffled down the page and out of site.

Mortal Coil was supposed to have a sequel, but I'm not writing it, and if I ever change my mind I will do so only for the benefit of my proofreader who seems to be the only person who cares (My latest chapter even had her in tears which I was proud about), but it won't be going up here. Once I finish writing Mortal Coil I'll increase it's updates to three or four a week and get it out of the way, after that I'm off to find new pastures. I've been playing around with some ideas for actual books I can start writing, something that I might one day be able to sell, so I'm going to be working on that stuff after Mortal Coil.