When You’ve Been Drained…
So I’ve touched on this a little bit two years ago in my post titled Confession: I’m a part-time writer, that I wasn’t really feeling writing as a career and that is still the truth. However there’s a reason as to why that happened, and I’ll explain why without getting into the nitty gritty of it all below.
As I’ve stated before I’ve always loved writing and I still do. I’ve been doing it since I was a child but since that time, I’ve been drained. What mean by that I’ve been taken advantage of and picked up bad habits that I’ve since dropped. Here’s the thing when you’re passionate about something and you want to learn as much as you can and you want to do as much as you can with that interest, you can meet people who can take advantage.
In 2011 I got more involved in the nerd community, I was so interested in comics and wanted to write my own. I naively believed that in order to do that I had to gain as much experience as I could (which is partly true). I also was trying to be more socially active and network and hopefully become friends with other folks who loved comics and other nerdy things (lol that was an epic fail and perhaps I’ll write about the issue of friendships some other time).
So what happened? Because I was so passionate and naïve I ended up writing for free for a lot of sites. Now I willingly wrote for free believing the lies they tell you when you do something for free. Still wanting to gain experience, I also wrote for free for some non-comic sites, and I even had created my own magazine which I created, wrote, and put together all by myself. I even tried my hand at creating my own nerd site which I wrote the majority of the articles on there (around 1,000) and I had three other writers who also contributed. But I couldn’t pay them so I shut the site down.
I had some good experiences doing that but it’s the bad experiences that stood out to me, in addition to the bad and terrible things that I had read and heard about other people going through. I’ve been falsely accused, blackballed, snapped at, etc. All because I wanted to write and gain experience. And on top of it I didn’t get paid for my work and at that time I didn’t have reliable internet so I would write at home but mostly at work, killing myself to get articles done because I thought
I should also mentioned how many people wanted me to write for them for free and when I said no or when I quit from a site they would put out a wanted ad for new writers who “really loved comics,” as if I didn’t because I didn’t want to do this for free. Oh and when some of these sites did decide to pay they wanted writers-present and new-to go through some type of contest before they could pick writers to pay to write.
And then I had folks who always wanted me to review their work which was fine but even some of them ended up being rude to me and treated me as if I was dog. What really hurt was when I did my damndest to promote my work and there were crickets or even worse the response was ridicule and not constructive criticism.
It’s been hard travels-some of which I could have avoided if I had just listened to my gut. There were a few folks who tried to help me and guide me-but they were and are still working on their own projects and so their help wasn’t always helpful or sincere.
All of this drained me…
But I’m slowly recovering.
My love of comics will always be strong and I still love writing-I’ve written and self-published poems, short stories, novellas, and novels that I’m mostly proud of. I know that I’ll keep on improving but:
So that’s what I’ve been doing and will continue to do. I know what I don’t like to do and I won’t be doing those things going forward. I’ve become more assertive and that’s taken me a long time since high school. While I still don’t know what my path is as far as writing goes, I still love it but I’m going to take my own path on this journey. I still jot down ideas and work on them but I’m doing this
So that’s my story.
Writing is my hobby and art is my happy little accident. View all posts by The Musings of a Blerd
Originally published at http://themusingsofablerd.com on June 23, 2021.
