6.)
I knew the internet was full of thoughtless people. I was just a name on a website. They had expectations of me that I never knew, that I couldn't possibly meet. Hell, I finished Academy I almost a year before that comment came through! And still…
I didn't get out of bed on Saturday. Well, I did. I used the bathroom. I made an appearance with my mom, so she thought I was just doing homework upstairs. I ate lunch and dinner with her. Sometimes that's what it means to not get out of bed: to get out of bed only the bare minimum so other people don't worry about you.
I read through the comment a dozen times, until I felt so sick that I couldn't read it anymore. "Disappointed." Didn't this guy know what Littles were like? Didn't he know that there was probably no word in the English language that hurt quite like that one? I just wanted to sleep until my skin flaked into paper and my bones dissolved into dust.
"It felt like a giant prologue." I guess it was, in a way. It was just an introduction of concepts. I thought it came across well as a standalone story, like a fun little vignette or something in a weird world where you don't fully understand the rules. Like, kids growing up. It was literally supposed to be a metaphor for infancy, for learning about the environment. Or maybe I was just too vague about that. Or maybe it wasn't that good a story.
I mean, Uncle Andrew just handed some kids magic rings that threw them into different worlds, but I always thought The Magician's Nephew was a pretty good book. It set up the villain for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I set up Nana a little bit… then again…
That commenter aptly pointed out that Nana didn't have much backstory. Or any, I guess. Maybe that was my flaw. But if I told the reader about Nana, they would learn too much about the Academy. They could start inferring things that I didn't want them to infer. I just wanted to start with some ideas and some sexy baby smut. I mean, it was my first real story!
And who is this guy anyway? Where are his stories? Why do people always criticize artists and writers and people that make things when they don't make anything themselves? Are they so entitled to think their opinions matter this much? Or do they know how much validation means to us? Are they trying to hurt us?
The worst part was that final comment. "Curious to see how the second one is." So he was going to keep reading it. So there was enough incentive for him to keep going. Why? He didn't say a single nice thing in the whole paragraph! He didn't give one compliment, one thing he enjoyed, one acknowledgement of the twenty-eight thousand words that made it worth reading. Why didn't he share any of that?
So what's really the point of leaving a comment then? Especially on a story from a year ago? I'm five stories in! I can't just rewrite it. I can't fix it. I can't make it more interesting or more standalone or more engaging. What were the words he used? "Something to latch onto." I thought I was doing that with the whole file at the end! And…
I was crying again.
It wasn't good enough. I should start over. I could do better. I could give this random stranger on the internet a reason to be proud of me. I could change everything about myself, all for some guy I would never meet. I'd do it. Honestly, from the bottom of my heart, I'd do it.
If I had the fucking energy.
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