I feel like some people don’t really get that I’m not out to compete with anybody else on this hellsite.
Like every now and then I will get tagged in something with someone being like “oh you mean the thing bibliosphere already did”, like that’s some sort of valid reason for a person not to do something. Unless they’re directly copy pasting my words to make a profit*—I don’t ever want to be used to put someone down or discourage them from being creative or doing their own thing.
Creative ideas all flow from the same wellspring of humanity, there’s nothing unique about the ideas I have. I just find ways to make them interesting in my own way. That’s what makes them mine, not the base foundation of storytelling, but the style in which it is told.
There’s more than enough room for all of us to get on and to also get along. This mentality of needing to step over others in order to succeed is a falsehood spread by those who have no other means to succeed than to put others down. They are not good people, and they are not secure or confident in what they do and they will never realize until it’s too late that being able to play nicely with others, working hard at their craft, and helping to build a strong community, is far more vital to the survival and success of art than their own 15 minutes of glory.
We already have marketing teams trying to pit us against each other, we’re told it’s a cruel hard world by people who are at the top of the structure and who don’t want it any other way because it benefits them for the masses to squabble and nit pick among themselves. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
Help others.
Be a light in dark places, whether it’s by being as loud as you can, or by simply saying “hey, good job.”
Pull people up as you go, and you only make the foundation on which you stand stronger. And when the time comes and you find yourself looking up, you’ll more than likely not find a hand reaching down. But at the very lest you’ll have others willing to boost you up where they can. And who knows, maybe together you can build something better.
I dunno. I’m rambling. Just, y’know. Don’t use me to put other people down. Don’t tell someone “you can’t write gay vampires cause Joy is doing it”, cause that is some nonsense. If anything we need more gay vampires. Who the hell ever shows up to a party and says “man I wish there was less cake”, like, come on.
*Please don’t do that. I’m a disabled content creator, my words are all I have, and I’ve already had to file a couple of take downs this year and last when my fanfic got posted on apple store as “original romance” for 99 cents. That you would take my work in the first place is harrowing to me, that you think so little of it is just plain insulting and I will yeet you out of this existence if I have to.
If I'm your savior, then you're mine. 