This time it won't hurt

My previous post, the one about Beacon Pines, was an experiment; I've just read some writing advice, and wanted to find out empirically what would happen if I tried applying it in practice.

That post didn't get much engagement; as of now, two emoji reacts and one comment on Discord, and nothing at all in gemspace. That in itself is to be expected. Like 99.9% of humanity, I'm no celebrity, so this much attention is realistically all I could hope for. And that _fucking sucks_.

... execpt not really, not this time. I feel pretty much OK, even though my usual emotional reaction to the usual amount of audience feedback is one of anguish and resentment. And I believe that I know why.

There's the way Duncan writes and the way I used to write. Both consist of "Write until ... you're no longer sure what to say next", the difference being what happens when you reach that point. Duncan's method consists of typing words on a keyboard; if you don't know what word comes next, go back and re-type the words that are already on the page. Repeat that until you get an idea of how to proceed. Whereas what I used to do, whenever I got stuck, was to power through it by spending willpower to force myself to come up with the next sentence.

Yeah, my "solution" was to spend willpower, often multiple times per paragraph of finished text. No wonder that by the end of it, by the time I hit "publish", I was feeling depleted and miserable. Surely the world owes me a lavish reward, to make up for all that self-inflicted suffering. Acknowledge my noble sacrifice, you ingrates!

This sense of entitlement predictably leads to disappointment, resentment, and long hiatuses between posts. I much prefer this new way of writing, whereby I produce words by typing on a keyboard instead of by repeated self-inflicted emotional abuse. I have not achieved popularity as a writer. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. But I have found a way, now, to write without self-injury. And without injury, there is no need to be "made whole".

I'm going to post this thing, that started out as an attempt to share a useful and surprising experimental result, and turned into something like a confession. I predict that I'll get the usual reaction, that is to say, almost none. But this time it won't hurt.