I've been thinking about something since I published my last fic a week ago, and I'm trying to work out the best way to explain it.
When I write I spend a lot of time with my story/characters, at minimum it's been a month for a my shorter one-shots, and for some of my WIP chapters it's up to two years of thinking/writing/editing and watching it evolve from the kernel of an idea that I first came up with. For my my most recent fic it was almost two months exactly from the point where I decided to finally start working on it (again, after a couple of years of having the idea in my my head). In particular the last couple of weeks before publishing I think about it constantly, and pretty much every bit of free time I can find is spent editing; it utterly ingrains itself in my brain to the point that I can pretty much edit it just while I'm thinking about it.
And then finally I post it and it's just...over.
It's out in the world and even though I have the ghost of it moving through my mind and body and I still have the reflex to reach for it, there's no need to anymore. I just have to sit and hope that there will be people out there who will want to reach for it instead, to take my place while I hope that it might leave a mark on someone's mind.
And yes, I realize that I could just re-read it, but I'm not someone who generally enjoys doing that with my own writing, I tend to just be hypercritical and pick it all apart and end up in a spiral wondering "why did I think this was worth sharing", and that's it's own struggle.
Likes are nice, but they don't communicate much to an author, and because this is Tumblr and it has no algorithm it does nothing to actually share it around. Is it a bookmark? Was it a reflexive like because they simply recognized a character? Is someone actually going to come back to read it a week, a month, a year later? Will they tell me when they do? It kind of creates this open-ended feeling of not knowing whether your work actually made an impact or not, and really just ends up creating more of a sense of uncertainty than anything.
But when someone reblogs a fic or a chapter, or leaves a comment, especially if they mention a particular part or line that they liked, it not only brings that joy that someone liked what I wrote, it also feels like it gives me a chance to reach for it again myself. To revisit the characters and their stories that I spent so much time with, and lets me feel a little bit of the love again that led me to write it all in the first place.
So please, if you're a reader, please understand that writers are not just looking for attention (I mean we kind of are, lets be real - we wouldn't be sharing if we weren't, otherwise it would just stay in our drafts), but more than that we're looking for someone to share out stories with, to know that there's someone out there carrying it and letting it continue to move through the world after we've given so much of our hearts and souls in the creation of it. Support the people who make the things that you love, you have no idea how much it's appreciated to be given a reason to come back to a stories that we've worked so hard on. 💕
