Thank The Clash for this 80s reference!

Should I stay or should I go?

The first couple of months here had been very refreshing and I've truly enjoyed the good feedback I'd gotten for my past stories I'd uploaded on here. I feel I started things off kinda good with TwiStar, then things have kinda petered to where I see literally nothing but red bar, red bar, and I've been saying over and over, good reactions, bad reactions, it doesn't matter, they're still reading it, but no, it does matter...

I feel... I feel I'm experiencing those same bad, awkward experiences I had with my first year on FurAffinity all those years ago... Damn, damn, damn, I had a meltdown because not enough people weren't reading my stories, so I rewrote them a little bit, I started adding in sex scenes then boom! I started getting more readers, and that should have felt great, and it did, but then I also had to start to question, and I still question it now, if people were looking because they were legitimately invested with the story, or because they just wanted the sex, and they were awful sex scenes too, the kind that read like a 5 year-old reading out of a medical dictionary trying to explain how sex works.

I've gotten better, I hope, at making sex scenes good, while making sure they are never the focus, the sex is not the story, the story is the characters interacting, working off of one another, going through their meaningless little dilemmas which to them are the most important thing at that moment, because that's how people are, when something goes down and it affects us, we want other people to share in our pain so we get sympathy.

It's been years now since I've even been to FA, SoFurry became my homebase for my writing and I've been there for four years already. Then I found this place, before this, I'd always had a major aversion to fanfiction writing because I always thought it would be harder working with characters which had already been established by someone else, working with someone else's original creation... I did a Redwall fanfic, YEARS AGO, in fact, my fursona, Jimmy Lee Darrell was created out of my want for a main bat character in the world of Redwall. The irony is that fanfic never had bats in it either...

Instead, Jimmy became a main character in my own original furry fiction, Jacob Marshall: Simple Beginnings, a gritty, violent, darkly comedic story about a rat named Jacob who gains the ability to control shadows and darkness itself. I wanted it to be the furry version of Heroes. I remember watching that show, absolutely loving the idea of superpowered characters, but they never had superhero names, they were just normal people, every day people who discover these abilities about themselves and, for the most part, it was pretty realistic in showing how these people dealt with their powers, some taking it to it easy, others being scared the world will see them as freaks, scared of what the government will do, some who accept their powers wholeheartedly, and I wanted to do that with furries. That became Jacob and Jimmy became his foil.

I wrote two whole books-worth of chapters... I had them all, first on FurAffinity, then I took them down after a mental breakdown, then on SoFurry where I had even begun writing a third book, before I took those down because of different reasons I'd rather not go into.

Now it's 2017, a new year has started, and I've begun to repost newly rewritten chapters of my original story, Simple Beginnings, and I have to wonder... do I keep going here? I thing... seeing this series, seeing how characters on this show are able to work together, it kinda helped shape how I write, because at first, I was more focused on doing big stories before I realized, you know, it's better, even easier just to do life! Why worry about the big story when you can get so much more out of people and their life's stories? Slice of life dramas had become my thing now and I'm good at it, I think... I have nearly unanimous five-star ratings on SoFurry, though I would readily admit, they give out those five stars too liberally, and they'd done it to stories I wrote, which I ultimately hated, like Procreation Inc, a short story I wrote which was purely about furries fucking and making babies, no real plot whatsoever, and to other writers who write like English is their third language, I've seen them get five stars chiefly because they wrote some porn, and all of that makes me think, people just look at my stuff for the sex and not for the story... I've been rambling a while...

Dead Austrian doctor in my brain keeps weighing in on me... Freaking Hans Asperger...

Anyway, the point I keep veering away from because I've never had a driving lesson in my life is that I'm starting to question my place here. I loved this at first, I loved that people were more honest here, more eager to let you know when they don't like something... but still, no one's talking... No one freaking talks and I can take all the downvotes, I can take all that, but then people don't offer criticism, they don't tell you what they think, they just hit that little button then go on their way, and I don't know what I did wrong, I can guess... because I can still see problems in my writing, I'll never say my writing is perfect, perfection doesn't exist, it's not a thing, we can strive for it, but we'll never get it, it's the neverending goal that we always chase. I just want to know what did I fuck up on this time or that time, I love criticism.

Anyway, I think I may have taken up an hour of your time, whomsoever reads this, so I readily apologize for me not silencing the Austrian doctor sooner, but this brain never sleeps, I need to be always constantly writing something so I don't lose my mind and I don't think I can take that.

This is Freakeasy, freaking out, Simplified, keeping it simple and Batboy8189, going batty, thank you for reading and good night.