First post of the year! (And it only took almost a week, lol!)
Lately, I've been struggling with the eternal competition between my drive to write (which is a necessary part of keeping a grip on what little sanity I have) and the dread of other people reading my awful writing. Which shouldn't be a problem, since I know my writing is terrible, and therefore the last thing I should be doing is putting it somewhere that other people can read it.
But I somehow ended up doing just that. I've been releasing fanfic on AO3 for quite a while now (and used to post snippets and short stories on the earlier version of this blog), but that auto-corrected for my lack of skill, in that most people just didn't read it.
Only now I'm releasing games on itch.io, visual novels and other interactive fiction. And mostly that still auto-corrects and no one reads plays them, but sometimes they do. And--in some ways worse--whether they actually read my words or not, some people download the games (albeit not in large numbers) and unless they were to leave a comment saying "this sucked i stopped fast" or something, I'll never know if they actually read it or if they just walked away quickly.
Which, I suppose, doesn't really matter, except for matters of my sanity. But there's also that one last pathetic shred of my childhood dreams of being a famous author. (Or actress. Or an astronaut...although, actually, that one died back in the late '80s...) That pitiful little shred makes me want to keep going and putting things out there for people to read even though I know what I'm putting out there is awful.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do about any of that.
(I mean, I know gamerjocks would say "git gud", but it's not like I can write better by just writing a lot; if that worked, I'd be brilliant by now.)
I know I should probably just stop posting my stuff, but...how can I when I've released the first novel of a series of seven, all of which were first written years ago? If there's even one person who's read the first one to completion (I have no idea if there are, but there have been people who have played the interactive version, a few who downloaded the interactive version, and even one who downloaded the .pdf of the non-interactive version, so there might be) then I feel obligated to make sure the whole series is released. And, honestly, I am kinda proud of some of the stuff in the later books; I feel like I came up with a truly original explanation for why Helen accompanied Paris to Troy. (And considering how much has been written on the subject, that's really saying something!) And I really like the way I handled Hades; the character gets such a bad rap in modern media, so I want to put more positive versions out there! (Gotta give mad props to the game Hades on that score: despite that he's the final boss (who you fight over and over and over and over again), their version of Hades is probably one of the best modern interpretations, and fits the actual lore quite well.)
There's also a sense of accomplishment that comes from releasing a video game. Even if it's free and not good.
There probably aren't any easy answers to my dilemma (aside from putting a stop to all public releases of my work), which only makes it worse.
I'll probably keep worrying about it for a long time to come.
