IWSG - Screaming into the Void

 

    As you can probably guess from the title of the post, I am not in a good headspace right now where my writing is concerned.  I feel like everything I do is just so much wasted time, especially concerning getting anyone to actually read what I've written.

    Last month, while I was trying to get the interactive version of my novel ready to post, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with a question from my mother regarding how I was spending my time since losing my job.  (Normally, this does not come up, because she's much too busy telling me about her latest health problems to ask anything about my life.)  Without any backup plan, I ended up telling the truth, that I'd been working on a rewrite of an old novel.  Then, to my horror, she prompted that of course I was going to try to submit it to a publisher.  I was not being pushed back down that road again (bad, bad, terrible story, that), so I went ahead and told her the truth that I had added some interactivity and was releasing it as a game.

    Her response?  "Oh, you should send it to your father so he can see it!"  (My father did not echo the sentiment in the slightest, and in fact remained silent for the entire conversation.)  Then she turns to my brother and says that of course I must have shown it to him already.  His response?  "Yes, it...contains words."

    Seriously, the only thing he could say about it was that it "contains words."  (Admittedly, it's not as though he's read the current draft, because he hated the first one so much because of one incident (that I repeatedly assured him was no longer there) that as far as I can tell he never even opened the file containing the new version, despite claims that he was going to beta read it for me.)

    I was reeling from that, so I tried to defend myself a little by telling her--the honest truth!--that I had already posted the first chapter as a demo of sorts, and that a few people had shown interest in it, and in possibly reading the rest.  (As the number of my "followers" on itch.io leapt up by six after the first chapter came out, I feel that to be an entirely honest statement.)  Her response?  To repeat the story of a character in a comic strip who was distraught when the number of his Twitter followers dropped in half over a single day, because his wife stopped following him.  Because evidently she assumed that my "few" had to be "one" and could only be my brother.

    With my supposedly supportive family being like that, it should of course come as no surprise that I could use some actual response--preferably at least mildly positive, but I'd settle for honest and insightful--from someone who has actually read what I wrote.  Of course, I have no way of getting that, except just putting it out there on the 'net and hoping.

    I released the game, and it is an abject and undeniable, catastrophic failure.

    Almost no one has even looked at the game's page, and less than a third of the people who have looked at the page have hit the "play" button to try it out.  I have no way of knowing if any of the few people who did play any part of it actually read it all the way through, but I suspect the maximum number of people who actually bothered is 1.  (And, in all honesty, I doubt that any of the few people who have clicked "play" bothered to come back and read the rest.  And as it's about 145k words long, it's pretty much impossible to read it all in one sitting unless one is a massive speed-reader.)

    Blogging is no different, really.  I post things, and almost no one reads them.  Even these IWSG posts don't get that many views.  That's okay, of course; I do nothing but complain about what a loser I am or about how much trouble I'm having with whatever project I'm working on.  If I was everyone else, I wouldn't want to read my posts, either.

    I know a lot of people turn to social media in times like these--both my general mindset and the current lockdown situation--but I know it would only be the same thing if I did.  If I took to a social media platform (beyond blogging, which is technically a social media), I would post whatever random content came to my mind, and maybe a few people would look at it, maybe a tiny percentage of those would even half-heartedly hit a "like" button, but mostly no one would even see it.  Because sometimes it feels like I'm invisible.  No, actually, it feels like the lyrics to this one song from the soundtrack to Reality Bites:  "I only exist in negative, no, no, no, bad!"  (Sorry, I forget the name of the song, or even the singer.  As soon as I realized I could use a flash drive to listen to music in my car, I ripped every CD I had into .mp3s and stuck them on a really big flash drive to listen to, which leaves me a little less clear on things like song titles and artists from mixed projects.)  I know that reference both marks my age and makes me sound appallingly shallow, but...well, if it makes me sound any less pitiful, I don't think I've actually watched the movie in this century, just listened to (about half of) the soundtrack album from time to time.

    Once upon a time, I would have tried "retail therapy" to help me get out of this funk, but with no income at the moment (and for whatever reason I was deemed ineligible for the last two rounds of stimulus checks, so I don't even have that money coming in) not to mention that I won't be getting my first COVID vaccination shot until two weeks from now (and as I both have asthma and am seriously obese, contracting COVID would be my death warrant), I can't really just go out shopping and buy something fun to cheer myself up.  Though I don't think it would really help even if I did, at this point.  (And online shopping just doesn't have the same effect.)

    At times, writing has helped me get through things like this, but I don't feel like it's helping right now.  It's hard to concentrate on it, in fact.  Though I am trying to get moving on the rewrite of the second book in the series.  (I've decided I'm going to post the first one's text onto AO3, so I can at least feel like maybe someone might read it.  Or at least get a better idea if anyone reads it.)