Quiet.

There is almost no way to create this post without it feeling incredibly whiny and pathetic. I have tried to keep the negative emotions that appear in this blog limited to things like anger at videogames and a limited amount of permitted My grandmother just died and My country are racist assholes style grief.

What I don’t often have reason to confront is reality when it comes to this blog. I write here, ostensibly as a typical blog – a simple place to dump my thoughts out there. That’s the pleasant lie, where I forward the notion that this is just a place to express opinions for the mere sake of it.

It’s not that, though. Not even though it pretends to be – this blog is an attempt to gain for me something I once had, and once loved. I used to have an audience. When I wrote erotica for audience members – people who were borderline anonymous to me – it was wonderful to know that I was giving something someone they would love, something they would care about.

The Long Live The Queen review gave me one thing I had been avoiding for so long. It showed me a statistic. It showed me how many people had listened to it. As of this moment, there are eight people who have listened to it. There were four when I posted it originally.

Four people.

I bet I know who you all are.

I bet I talk to you every day.

I bet of the people who do talk to me every day, there are some of you who did not in fact, listen to it. You’ll go check my blog when I tell you about it, but you’re not interested in it. It’s an extension of interacting with me, it’s not a thing worth reading in and of itself.

I had in my mind this vague idea that I’d put stats management on the site and be pleasantly surprised to find I had maybe thirty or forty people following the blog on a regular basis, given that I’ve tried to promote myself on twitter and even had rare, pleasant moments like when a developer retweeted me talking about her game.

I’ve been doing this for fourteen months now. I have posted almost four hundred and fifty times, and the only people reading it are people who I talk to regularly. I wrote a book last year and I think maybe three, four people have read it.

I want to do this for a living. I want to be a writer. I am not going to be those things if the only people who care about my work are people who already care about me, as a person.

I have spent the day going through many stages of grief and self-loathing. I considered saying nothing today, not blogging at all, just stopping posting entirely, not even posting One Stone and cancelling all the scheduled reviews. Just let it go, now that I knew the painful truth that my writing is not even interesting enough to be worth reading to my full circle of friends. It’s tempting.

I don’t think I’ll do that. I think I want to keep producing One Stone. I think I want to keep trying.

But if you don’t mind, I’m going to feel vomitously wretched, depressed, and self-loathing now, realising that my most ambitious hopes of ‘maybe thirty’ were gross and ridiculous exaggerations, parodies of an ego so overinflated that it was off by a factor of almost ten.

3 Comments

  1. A wise villain once noted that complicated plans tend to fail. Therefore, you should have many such plans going at once, to increase the probability that at least one of them succeeds.

    Popularity doesn’t rise in direct association with quality. An excellent work may remain niche for years before a chance memetic event brings it to prominence. Varying strategy might help, but the most important thing is to just keep doing what you do, and keep telling people about it.

  2. You got Advertising problems, man.

  3. I wish I’d read this before I saw you on Friday man. Know that you are not alone.

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