Precious Reader

Stories deserve great readers. I’m a beta reader who provides honest, constructive feedback to help writers improve their work. You can find my Fiverr link below if you'd like me to read your story. https://www.fiverr.com/s/1qD9PQp

[preciousreader1]

I think one of the most revealing questions you can ask a writer is:

"What part of your story came first?"

Not the title.

Not the genre.

Not even the plot.

The very first thing.

Was it a character?

A scene?

A line of dialogue?

A setting?

A random "what if" question?

It's always fascinating to me because two people can end up writing completely different books from ideas that started in almost the same way.

Writers, what was the very first piece of your current project to exist?

[dragonbreathesfire8]

Children of the Weeping Sky

Perhaps it was the weeping sky,

In sorrow for a hidden love.

The drops did not taste bitter there,

As if from some angelic cry.

Yet still I stood beneath the storm,

My cooling tears against the heat,

To soothe the madness of my rage,

And quiet down the climate’s form.

Will they believe the words I say,

These drops are only children coming home?

Rescued sons and daughters, falling down,

To kiss the face of mothers far away?

Will they hear the song I sing?

Of this patter, their laughter is found?

As droplets leap to mothers' arms,

And dance into the pooling ground,

To cool the fumes that rage around.

Yet, still I stood beneath the storm,

With pooling tears and heavy stride,

To chase a river, freshly born,

Where blooms and missing dears abide,

Believing tales of thirst and pride.

[preciousreader1]

writers will spend hours fixing a sentence that readers would never even notice

not because the sentence is bad

but because something about it feels emotionally untrue

that kind of frustration is hard to explain to non-writers

[playbucky]

For those who don’t know I have 5 books out, currently working on the 6th and would greatly appreciate if anyone can support me. Either by buying a book or sharing this 💕

[ruielthecreatorofideas]

The Purpose of Existence

What is the purpose of living?

The purpose of endlessly giving?

The purpose of tearing my heart out and giving away pieces of it

What makes me feel like this?

What makes me feel like wanting is greedy?

What makes me feel like taking is worse than being needy?

I want to know what the purpose of existence is

But nobody is willing to tell me this

The silence in the crowd

I know I let you down

The pain overwhelms me

And it's strange how I'm the only one who can see

That this was never right

My words are not supposed to be so polite

I drown in thoughts and feelings

Why am I not screaming?

[preciousreader1]

you keep fixing it

you keep fixing the words

moving sentences changing lines

trying to make it feel right

but what if

it was never the words

you were trying to fix

[preciousreader1]

[preciousreader1]

why does it feel like the story in my head is better than the one on the page?

and how do you fix something you can’t fully see? @ruielthecreatorofideas

[preciousreader1]

too close

you read your story again

and again

and again

until the words stop meaning anything

until the scene feels distant

like something you didn’t write

maybe it’s not broken

maybe you’re just too close to see it clearly

[preciousreader1]

why do we write the stories we’re afraid to finish?

is it the ending or the truth waiting there, quietly, patiently, asking to be seen?

[ruielthecreatorofideas]

You Peeled Away My Comfort

I was so close to getting a grasp of what I needed

But I have never succeeded

The layers of comfort were slowly peeled away from me

Without me even noticing what was happening to me

You did this to make me do your bidding

What would you do if you found me unwilling?

All the comfort I tried to gain

You stole from me, making me feel the discomfort you ingrained

My body is fighting my mind

This pain I carry deep inside

Do you really think that I wanted it unearthed again?

Little pieces of sympathy isn't enough to make you my friend

You peeled away my comfort so effortlessly

And now I feel so empty

Like everything I tried to fix ended up being redundant

Why did you steal my chance at depression management?

Is this a ploy to make my failures more obvious?

To ruin my life when I was left oblivious?

My thoughts spiral like a malignant force

It's due to you, of course

I feel everything overwhelm me like a cancerous tumor

It's funny how I no longer know who you are

But to constantly invade my thoughts and betray my every intention

I don't know if you want some kind of reaction

I just know that you laid me bare

With no comfort left to even share

My words start to not make any sense

And I don't know if others can tell the difference

My throat tightens up like some kind of anaphylaxis

But it's my PTSD that caused this

I struggle to breathe

I just want to leave

But I have to keep going

Even whilst knowing

That the medicine doesn't always work perfectly

But it does slow down my anxiety

To the point where I can breathe again

Do you really want me to die, my false friend?

Are you so willing to watch me fall to the floor?

My body trembling as I can't breathe anymore?

And the medicine doesn't kick in right away

So, what can I say?

[ruielthecreatorofideas]

Some People

Some people don't listen

Some people don't understand

Some people don't care

Some people don't notice

Some people change drastically

Some people change only a little

Some people change overnight

Some people change slowly

Some people see the truth

Some people see only lies

Some people see nothing in you

Some people see everything in you

Some people see only what they want to see

Some people see only what they don't want to see

Some people want what's best for you

Some people want nothing to do with you

Some people want everything

Some people want nothing

Some people are pessimistic in nature

Some people are optimistic even when facing failure

Some people are on your side

Some people are not

Some people care

Some people don't

Some people trust

Some people won't

But who does this make you?

Are you going to let this get to you?

[preciousreader1]

Clarity

you don’t need a better story

you need

to see your story clearly

[preciousreader1]

You’re Too Close

you keep rewriting that one scene

not because it’s bad

but because you can’t see it anymore

you’ve read it too many times

felt it too many ways

you’re not fixing it

you’re searching for something you can’t see from here

[ruielthecreatorofideas]

If I Could Be Anything Else

If I lose control and it all falls apart

Where should I go when the misery starts?

If I hold a single lit candle up to my face

Would my feelings still not leave this place?

If I blow out the candle hoping for no more remorse

Do you still think that they'd believe I am cursed?

If I withered away like a flower that was picked

Would the emptiness inside still stick?

If I built up castles and kingdoms as I claimed

Would they still believe that I'm insane?

If I could prove my mind works this way

Would you still ask me to stay?

If I died alone in a room filled to the brim with my hopes and dreams

Would my life be the only thing that wasn't seen?

If I put in the effort to make this all right

Would I still struggle to sleep at night?

If I fixed my life and made myself better

Would they still laugh at me when I try to be clever?

If I became the monster I see in my head

Would they be running and screaming instead?

If I became ugly from my feelings inside

Would it give me more reasons to hide?

If I was the one who could prove the truth

Would it give back my ruined youth?

If I could tell a story so impossibly real

Would they understand or would they not feel?

If I helped the people who were lost

Would people consider the cost?

If I was anyone else but myself

Do you think I could save myself?

If I was so broken that I can't be repaired

Do you think that they still wouldn't care?

If I die because of someone else's actions years before I'm due

Do you think they wouldn't understand the clues?

If I live much longer than I expected

Do you think I wouldn't still feel rejection?

If I was lonely with and without someone by my side

Do you think it's still a matter of pride?

If I had nothing left

Do you think I should speak the truth under my breath?

If I was so full of life

Would you still hold that knife?

If I was nobody at all anymore

What, if anything, would be the cure?

[preciousreader1]

Writers…

What if the only thing your story is missing is seeing it the way a reader does?

Not rewriting everything. Not starting over.

Just clarity.

Because sometimes… you’re not stuck.

You’re just too close to your own story.

[luna-azzurra]

A Love Letter to Every Writer who almost quit Today!

You are doing something that has no good explanation when someone asks you about it at a party. You are doing something that looks from the outside like a person sitting alone staring at a screen or a notebook and moving their lips slightly and occasionally deleting everything they just made. It does not look like much. It does not look like anything. And you have spent years trying to find the words to explain to people who will never get it why you keep coming back to this thing that pays badly and humiliates you regularly and asks everything from you and gives back something you cannot even show them properly.

And i want to tell you something. You don't owe anyone that explanation. Not ever. What you are doing is one of the most quietly radical acts a human being can perform and the fact that it doesn't look like it from the outside is part of what makes it so strange and so necessary and so yours.

Here is what you actually do. you take a human being, a real one or an imagined one, and you put them on a page, and suddenly they are alive somewhere they were never alive before. You give them a Life. You give them a specific fear. You give them the way they hold their cup when they're pretending not to be upset. You give them a mother who meant well and failed anyway. You give them a moment where they almost said the true thing and then didn't. And then someone on the other side of the world, someone you will never meet, someone living a life that looks nothing like yours, opens the page and finds that person and goes oh. Oh that's real. I know that. i thought i was the only one who knew that. and something in them that was clenched opens slightly.

That is not a small thing. that is not a hobby. that is one human consciousness reaching through time and paper and language and finding another one in the dark and saying you are not alone in this specific way that you thought was only yours.

People will tell you it doesn't matter. they will say it more politely than that, they will ask what your plan is, they will ask about the job market, they will say they could never be that creative like it's a compliment when it's actually a way of putting what you do in a box they don't have to think about anymore. And some of them genuinely cannot access what you do, they are not built for it, and that is fine, that is not a moral failing, but it means they are also genuinely unable to measure what it's worth. They are measuring silence with a ruler. They are asking how much the color blue weighs. the instrument is wrong. their inability to quantify it is not evidence that it has no value. it is evidence that value comes in more than one currency and they only learned one.

Think about the books that kept you alive. And i don't mean that metaphorically, i mean it exactly. Think about the specific book you found at the specific moment when you needed proof that someone somewhere had felt this feeling and survived it or at least felt it fully enough to write it down. Think about what it meant that someone had already been here before you. That the thing you thought was a private malfunction was actually a human condition that had been written about and wrestled with and turned into something that could live on a shelf and wait for you to need it.

Someone made that. A person, a tired person, a person with doubts and a day job and people in their life who didn't quite get it, sat down and made the thing that would one day be the thing that saved you. They had no idea you existed. They wrote it anyway. That is the covenant you are part of. That is the line you stand in.

And yes, one person reading your work and feeling less alone is enough. I know the world wants scale. I know the world wants numbers and reach and metrics and impact reports. But one person is a universe. One person's interior life is more complex than any system we have ever built. If you write something that changes the temperature inside one person's chest, that ripples. It ripples in ways you will never track and never see and never get credit for.

They will be slightly different in a conversation they have three years from now because of something you made. They will recognize something in someone they love because you taught them the word for it. They will be a little less cruel to themselves on a Wednesday in november because once they read something you wrote and it gave them permission. You will never know, but the work still did it.

Here is something else nobody says enough. You are one of the few people trying to slow time down. Everything else speeds it up. Everything else is designed to get you to the next thing faster, to skim, to scroll, to consume and move on. And you are sitting there trying to make someone stop. Trying to make someone stay inside a moment long enough to actually feel it. Trying to reconstruct the full weight of a single look between two people or the exact specific grief of a particular kind of loss or the strange comedy of being alive in a body with a brain that contradicts itself constantly. You are working against the entire direction of the culture and you are doing it one sentence at a time and that is not naive, that is not precious, that is a form of resistance that doesn't get called resistance because it's too quiet and too slow and doesn't photograph well.

You give people language for things they were living without language for. and living without language for something is a particular kind of suffering. It makes you feel crazy. It makes you feel like the thing isn't real or isn't valid or is too strange to be shared. and then someone writes the sentence that names it and suddenly it exists outside of you. Suddenly it has edges. suddenly it is a thing that can be pointed to and said yes, that, that is the thing, i thought it was only inside me. you did that. a sentence did that. Do you understand how much power that is. do you understand that naming something is one of the oldest forms of power humans have ever practiced and you do it on a page for strangers and ask nothing back.

You let people live lives they will never get to live. You let the person who never left their small town stand in a street in a city they'll never visit and feel the specific loneliness of being unknown and free all at once. You let the person who is dying live a little longer inside a character who isn't. You let the person who is afraid of their own anger follow a character who burns everything down and feel the heat of it safely from the inside. You let the person who has never been loved the way they needed to be loved read about it happening and feel it happening to them, feel it in their actual body, because the brain does not fully distinguish between a real experience and one rendered in enough detail and with enough truth. You are giving people experiences their lives didn't give them. You are expanding what it is possible for a person to feel and know and understand about being human.

You are not wasting your life. i know it can feel like that. i know there are days when the gap between what you imagined and what you made is so enormous and so humiliating that you can't see the point. i know there are years that feel like they produced nothing, years that were actually building something underground that you couldn't see yet. i know the world does a very good job of making you feel like the things it can measure are the things that matter and everything else is self-indulgence for people who couldn't hack the real thing.

that is a lie the world tells because the world is largely run by people who stopped listening to the part of themselves that needed what you make. they stopped and they built systems that reflect that stopping and now the systems say your thing has no value because the systems cannot hold your thing, cannot process it, cannot turn it into a number. that is a failure of the systems. it is not a verdict on the work.

keep writing. keep writing the hard true thing. keep writing the version nobody asked for. keep writing past the part where it's comfortable and into the part where it gets strange and specific and uncomfortably close to the real thing you were actually trying to say. keep writing for the person who needed this five years ago. keep writing for the person who needs it right now and doesn't know yet that you're making it. keep writing because you are one of the people still insisting that the interior life is worth this much attention, this much care, this much time. that insistence matters. in a world that is very loud about very little, the quiet stubborn act of trying to render human experience honestly and fully is not nothing.

it is, actually, close to everything.

[preciousreader1]

@ruielthecreatorofideas

@alexisrook

@soapysam18