D.O.A.

Well, it looks like my first story is dead on arrival. A 75% disapproval rating is pretty damning, despite how small the sample size is. Four dislikes don't look that bad without context, and even with context it just looks like a rocky start. However, I can still predict that this story isn't going to succeed.

My reasoning is two-fold: confirmation bias and oversaturation. The simple fact is that no-one is going to go out of their way to read three thousand words from a source with a red bar next to the title telling you, 'we disliked the story so much, that we decided to let him know it without giving him the vaguest hint on how to improve.' Now, this might seem like an exaggeration, but at the time of this writing, I have no comments. Now you might think I'm being entitled. That's fair enough, and I don't have a perfect answer to that. I know this might be a bit of a tangent (not boding well for my first blog,) but perhaps some perspective might help.

Imagine you're a new writer, and you see that a few genres are a little repetitive. Everyone uses the same tags, and everyone seems to fall into similar descriptions in similar situations. And then you see some real innovation (it was Milk Machine for me), and you see it endorsed to high heaven. You feel inspired by that, you think to yourself, man these people are really pining for a fic that doesn't pull its punches. You've spent the better half of three days trying to get your first work perfect, or at least good enough were people will care enough to tell you what you missed. You know it's not going to be easy, so you take a little extra time to refine the grammar and spelling. You publish it and through some dumb miracle, it passes. Then, not a day later, the bar is half red. 'So one person didn't like it, I should expect this much given that I'm pioneering some new ground.' Then the bar gets redder. Now you've got a problem.

Let me explain. You see, when your skimming for a decent story, you're not looking to waste time on some half-assed drivel, you just want to relax with a stimulating piece of work you can flow through. When you scroll around a story like mine you don't think, 'I'm sure people are just exaggerating,' you think, 'No thanks, I'll look for something a little less risky.'

Now that's perfectly fine. My stories aren't for everyone, and I'm definitely not going to play it safe with them, but that's where the second halve of this comes in. Let's say you feel a little bad about yourself, you've made a few dumb mistakes that day, you're off your game, we've all been there, and you want to see how bad this red-bar-story gets. You find that some unique behaviors aren't explained right away, so you attribute it to mischaracterization, a few things in the tags and description haven't happened yet, so you think the author is either lying or being forgetful. Nevermind that the story isn't finished yet, you've had enough, it's time to downvote. Soon the bar gets redder as more people with that mindset seem to be the only ones dumb enough to spend their time on such a decidedly unworthy narrative.

It's a vicious cycle, and it's only a matter of time before I start getting hate comments, but, whether through blessing or curse, I am stubborn enough to keep going. There is no financial incentive here, so I can just be content that my narrative is somewhere on the server, but I can only be satisfied with that when my narrative is complete. I'd love to give myself a deadline, but I'm new to this and my inspiration is still fickle. Hopefully, I can learn for all the artist that never finish anything and give myself a kick in the pants when I slip into that mindset.

Well, that's enough self-loathing for a while, I gotta get back to writing.