How I became insecure about posting fic
I've made a few false starts at trying to write out this story and I've told bits and pieces of it before, mostly in tiny comments over Twitter, but I haven't told the whole thing to anyone, not even my closest friends. I didn't want - and still don't want - anyone to tell me my feelings are wrong or give me advice. While I might be able to manage it now, at the time I didn't know how to say, even to the people I'm closest to, "This thing happened and my feelings are hurt. Please only say things to me that can be rephrased as 'Poor baby. I'm sorry that happened to you. I love you/think you're great/know you're awesome.'" Telling this story to all of you feels scary and vulnerable: I'm telling you about something that hurt my feelings, I'm telling you about the soft places where I can be hurt, and I just have to trust that you're not going to use it to hurt me.
I feel bad about myself reading anon memes even when they're not about me. In my teens and early twenties, I subscribed to the idea that being snarky, sarcastic, and clever (even if it was mean) was cool. Sometime in my mid-twenties, I decided I wanted to be kind. Following some advice I read, I started out by just noticing the things I wanted to change. It was really, really, really painful to notice all the ways I thought, spoke, and acted unkindly. I didn't like that about myself. I'm not saying I'm perfect at being kind now, but I'm much better, and I make a conscious effort to think, speak, and act from a place of love and compassion. I have the question, "Are you adding meanness or kindness to the world right now?" on the wall across from my desk at home to remind me that I want to act with kindness. When I read anon memes, I can feel that mean part of me re-engaging. I've even gone so far as to hit reply and type in a comment before I thought, "What are you doing?" and closed the tab instead. I don't like the hit of smug superiority I get from reading them. I don't want to feel that way, and I don't want to be that way. And yet, even knowing I don't like how they make me feel, I sometimes went and read anon memes anyway.
The last time I read an anon meme was, I hope, the last time. Last year someone on Twitter mentioned something that I went looking for. I don't remember what it was or if I ever found it, because as I was reading through the anon meme, I ran across a thread that started with "Has anyone read rsadelle's latest story?" The commenter thought it wasn't very good. The second commenter made a comment about what they specifically thought made it not very good. At that point, I wasn't that bothered; in the general case, not everyone likes everything, and in the specific case, the story they didn't like was something I'd been referring to as "ridiculousness" and mostly wrote over email to entertain myself and a friend. But then the third comment said, "Isn't all her fic like that?" That stung and made the criticism stick with me.
One of the hard things about reading anon memes is that because they're anonymous, you don't know who's saying these things or how many people are involved in the conversation. If I knew who said that, I could look and see that the stories they do like are exactly the stories I don't like. If I knew how many people were involved in the conversation, I could say, "Oh, well, it's just two people." But because I don't know who said that or how many people were agreeing, it could be anyone and any number of someones. That person could be an influential bnf who is going to tell everyone she knows not to read my fic because it's terrible. It could be that there are a lot of people involved in that conversation who agree that my writing is terrible. It could be that only one or two people are saying that, but a lot of people are thinking it. Logically, I know that it's probably just a few people for whom my writing just isn't their thing. But emotions don't necessarily have anything to do with logic, and I started in on a "people probably aren't going to like this" loop. It didn't make me stop writing or enjoying my own writing, but it did make me start to feel insecure about posting fic.
A few months after that, I posted incest fic involving a non-celebrity sibling and got yelled at for posting it unlocked. (Note: this is not an invitation to discuss whether or not that was a good idea or if I should have gotten yelled at. I did the same thing in a previous fandom and no one cared.) If it had been a different time of year, I might have just dealt with being yelled at. But this was in the second half of August, and at the end of August, I'm worn out by the heat and not dealing particularly well. I locked the story. I also sulked, and I moved a bunch of stories to a Google Docs folder named "Unposted" because I decided if people were going to say mean things about people who write about non-celebrity siblings or partners (another thing I've read people criticizing on anon memes), I would just keep that stuff only for my own entertainment. I also spent a lot of time seriously considering other options for posting fic: going back to posting only on LJ or posting on LJ and then later doing backdated imports to AO3 so people who wanted to read my fic could but it would mostly go unnoticed by fandom as a whole. I thought maybe I would finish the two large stories I had in progress that I'd talked about a lot and people had expressed an interest in and then be done with hockey. When I did post fic, I had to work up to it, and I spent a lot of time thinking, "Here's something else people won't like."
And then I posted A Good Education (formerly known as Danny goes to college) and people actually liked it. Let me explain about Danny goes to college: when I first started writing it, I said, "I don't want to write narration for this." lakeeffectgirl said, "You can always put it in later," and I said, "But I don't want to write it at all," and I didn't. I've been trying to learn how to write narration. Hockey fandom in particular seems to love narration and feelings exposition. But it's just not me. It's hard, and it doesn't feel natural. With Danny goes to college, I wanted to write something that was fun for me to write. In the end, the story was 73,000 words (fandom might say they like long stories, but reading something that long takes a real time commitment) of dialogue and sex scenes with no narration or feelings exposition, very little plot, and jokes that are possibly only funny to me. Now, that's entirely my kind of thing, but I didn't think it was fandom's. Let's go back to that anon meme conversation I mentioned at the beginning. The comment before the "Isn't all her fic like that?" total dismissal of everything I've ever written was, "It's just a recitation of events." Having people like Danny goes to college, which was all the kind of thing I like to write and none of the narration I expect those commenters like, went a long way toward easing my insecurity about posting fic in this fandom.
I haven't completely gotten over that insecurity. I still sometimes think, "No one is going to like this" when I write fic, especially when it's mostly dialogue. I still feel insecure about posting fic. I posted some things as snippets to my LJ during 31 days of fic that could actually have been given real titles and headers and posted to AO3 if I weren't hyperconscious of what (some of) hockey fandom doesn't like. I didn't sign up for hockey big bang because I let feeling unwelcome outweigh how much I wanted someone to draw AGally, Prusty, and a baby. But it's getting better. Having people like Danny goes to college (it's currently my fifth most kudosed story) helps. Having people on Tumblr tell me they appreciate that I love Mike and Jeff's girlfriends helps. Having people compliment my fic for getting at some emotional point without a lot of words helps. Maybe one day I'll get back to thinking only about what I want to write and not thinking at all about whether or not anyone else will like it. And maybe now that I've told this story I can stop dwelling on it.
I feel bad about myself reading anon memes even when they're not about me. In my teens and early twenties, I subscribed to the idea that being snarky, sarcastic, and clever (even if it was mean) was cool. Sometime in my mid-twenties, I decided I wanted to be kind. Following some advice I read, I started out by just noticing the things I wanted to change. It was really, really, really painful to notice all the ways I thought, spoke, and acted unkindly. I didn't like that about myself. I'm not saying I'm perfect at being kind now, but I'm much better, and I make a conscious effort to think, speak, and act from a place of love and compassion. I have the question, "Are you adding meanness or kindness to the world right now?" on the wall across from my desk at home to remind me that I want to act with kindness. When I read anon memes, I can feel that mean part of me re-engaging. I've even gone so far as to hit reply and type in a comment before I thought, "What are you doing?" and closed the tab instead. I don't like the hit of smug superiority I get from reading them. I don't want to feel that way, and I don't want to be that way. And yet, even knowing I don't like how they make me feel, I sometimes went and read anon memes anyway.
The last time I read an anon meme was, I hope, the last time. Last year someone on Twitter mentioned something that I went looking for. I don't remember what it was or if I ever found it, because as I was reading through the anon meme, I ran across a thread that started with "Has anyone read rsadelle's latest story?" The commenter thought it wasn't very good. The second commenter made a comment about what they specifically thought made it not very good. At that point, I wasn't that bothered; in the general case, not everyone likes everything, and in the specific case, the story they didn't like was something I'd been referring to as "ridiculousness" and mostly wrote over email to entertain myself and a friend. But then the third comment said, "Isn't all her fic like that?" That stung and made the criticism stick with me.
One of the hard things about reading anon memes is that because they're anonymous, you don't know who's saying these things or how many people are involved in the conversation. If I knew who said that, I could look and see that the stories they do like are exactly the stories I don't like. If I knew how many people were involved in the conversation, I could say, "Oh, well, it's just two people." But because I don't know who said that or how many people were agreeing, it could be anyone and any number of someones. That person could be an influential bnf who is going to tell everyone she knows not to read my fic because it's terrible. It could be that there are a lot of people involved in that conversation who agree that my writing is terrible. It could be that only one or two people are saying that, but a lot of people are thinking it. Logically, I know that it's probably just a few people for whom my writing just isn't their thing. But emotions don't necessarily have anything to do with logic, and I started in on a "people probably aren't going to like this" loop. It didn't make me stop writing or enjoying my own writing, but it did make me start to feel insecure about posting fic.
A few months after that, I posted incest fic involving a non-celebrity sibling and got yelled at for posting it unlocked. (Note: this is not an invitation to discuss whether or not that was a good idea or if I should have gotten yelled at. I did the same thing in a previous fandom and no one cared.) If it had been a different time of year, I might have just dealt with being yelled at. But this was in the second half of August, and at the end of August, I'm worn out by the heat and not dealing particularly well. I locked the story. I also sulked, and I moved a bunch of stories to a Google Docs folder named "Unposted" because I decided if people were going to say mean things about people who write about non-celebrity siblings or partners (another thing I've read people criticizing on anon memes), I would just keep that stuff only for my own entertainment. I also spent a lot of time seriously considering other options for posting fic: going back to posting only on LJ or posting on LJ and then later doing backdated imports to AO3 so people who wanted to read my fic could but it would mostly go unnoticed by fandom as a whole. I thought maybe I would finish the two large stories I had in progress that I'd talked about a lot and people had expressed an interest in and then be done with hockey. When I did post fic, I had to work up to it, and I spent a lot of time thinking, "Here's something else people won't like."
And then I posted A Good Education (formerly known as Danny goes to college) and people actually liked it. Let me explain about Danny goes to college: when I first started writing it, I said, "I don't want to write narration for this." lakeeffectgirl said, "You can always put it in later," and I said, "But I don't want to write it at all," and I didn't. I've been trying to learn how to write narration. Hockey fandom in particular seems to love narration and feelings exposition. But it's just not me. It's hard, and it doesn't feel natural. With Danny goes to college, I wanted to write something that was fun for me to write. In the end, the story was 73,000 words (fandom might say they like long stories, but reading something that long takes a real time commitment) of dialogue and sex scenes with no narration or feelings exposition, very little plot, and jokes that are possibly only funny to me. Now, that's entirely my kind of thing, but I didn't think it was fandom's. Let's go back to that anon meme conversation I mentioned at the beginning. The comment before the "Isn't all her fic like that?" total dismissal of everything I've ever written was, "It's just a recitation of events." Having people like Danny goes to college, which was all the kind of thing I like to write and none of the narration I expect those commenters like, went a long way toward easing my insecurity about posting fic in this fandom.
I haven't completely gotten over that insecurity. I still sometimes think, "No one is going to like this" when I write fic, especially when it's mostly dialogue. I still feel insecure about posting fic. I posted some things as snippets to my LJ during 31 days of fic that could actually have been given real titles and headers and posted to AO3 if I weren't hyperconscious of what (some of) hockey fandom doesn't like. I didn't sign up for hockey big bang because I let feeling unwelcome outweigh how much I wanted someone to draw AGally, Prusty, and a baby. But it's getting better. Having people like Danny goes to college (it's currently my fifth most kudosed story) helps. Having people on Tumblr tell me they appreciate that I love Mike and Jeff's girlfriends helps. Having people compliment my fic for getting at some emotional point without a lot of words helps. Maybe one day I'll get back to thinking only about what I want to write and not thinking at all about whether or not anyone else will like it. And maybe now that I've told this story I can stop dwelling on it.