Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Rant about word counts and hate comments.

I am one of those writers where I love to celebrate different milestones with my followers. things like a higher word per minute total or doing a writing sprint and getting a higher word count, reaching a certain amount of words in my story or finishing it.

but with that comes the hate. it's quality over quantity. messages saying you won't make it and just trying to bring you down and stop you feeling good about your writing.

one of which inspired this blog post. I was asking questions for my book I am writing about endometriosis and someone slides upon the question and wrote a message telling me to get a real job and that I need to stop being happy about how many words I wrote because they will be all shit anyway.

these messages don't discourage me they make me work harder. I am not one to get down and think about what I'm doing wrong, well I am but when it comes to writing I can get all these feelings out on paper and turn it into something more, something amazing.

for the longest time, I took these messages as this is what I should be doing, by stoping every chapter, every page to rewrite and edit and do all the stuff I do now at the end of the book I stopped loving writing, it was no longer something I love but more of a chore. I got myself into writers' block badly, I left books unfinished because I just couldn't make it perfect and now I fix it at the end. my first draft is getting the story down no matter how good or bad it will be and then going through and fixing it, putting it away for three months and coming back with a clear mind, no longer having my head tell me everything that needs to be done still.

on the getting a 'real' job front it's very complicated, I hate to drop out of high school because of endometriosis and any boss says that I would be unreliable and can't have a job there so I made my writing my job. I have a fiver where I offer to ghostwrite and beta read, write blog posts and even proofread and edit things. I also do freelance gigs, working in a normal 9 to 5 job is impossible for me so I had to find a way to make a job out of something I love and can do and that is writing, that is youtube and that is my business.  whats to say that I am no good at writing and cant to make it a career? I am about to query one of my books to publishing houses and I'm excited for how far I have come in this world of writing.

what I'm getting at is that people are going to hate no matter what and what works for you is what matters not what people think you should be doing, keep your head high and push through it, find a way that works for you and stick to it and the first draft is never going to be perfect no matter how hard you try that's what editing and proofreading are for.

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