The Day My Mind Went Blank By: itserinne No comments

Help!!My Mind is Blank!!
On second thought, perhaps it's just resting. 

Update Soon : This phrase is one of the most annoying comments I never wanted to receive but am unfortunate to always get from my readers. When I say readers, what I mean is the 20 people who subscribed to my story. Sadly, only 1/4 of them understands me when I say R & R (read and review). I sometimes even go to the extent of putting "comments, suggestions and violent reactions are deeply appreciated." 

  I’m sitting in my room, staring at a blank sheet of Word Document. The cursor continues to blink, checking the time… an hour has already passed and I still have nothing. I’m in a panic, I haven’t updated my story for almost two weeks now. For a few, that’s not a cause of distress but for someone like me I know those few days that I haven’t written or posted anything means a loss of readers, a cause for followers to unsubscribe and that’s a risk I don’t want to take.

  It was late July when I decided to man it up and post a story in a certain fan café. It’s an online community where avid fans of a certain KPop group I’m currently going gaga over with come together to “spazz” about said KPop group. I’ve had the story, the concept, even the chapters all planned out. The only thing that I need to do is take that risk. And so I did… like many others I’ve posted the teaser, I even went to the extent as to make my own poster. I left it alone for a few weeks to see if someone would be interested. I was so excited to check back on my account and see the comments they would leave about my story.  But excitement turned to disappointment. Two weeks have gone and two or three other stories were posted, old stories had views and were given comments on. Mine is at the bottom of the page, being ignored.

  I thought to myself was my story that uninteresting? Or maybe it’s something they weren’t used to reading; you know the usual boy-meets-girl-fall-in-love-break-up-and-get-back-together-again. But do I want to be conventional in order to satisfy them? No. So I decided to stick to my story plot, posted the first chapter, then the second. Still no response, so I said if the third chapter still doesn’t get any response (there are views, but of course I want to know if people understand what I write, so I need comments), I’ll stop. I’d still write the story but I’ll just keep it to myself. 

  A few days after the third chapter was posted, I logged in to the site expecting my story to be on the bottom of the page again only to see it on the top part of the page, two members of the forum decided to speak up and comment on my work. I was giddy! Regardless if it was a bad comment or a good one, I didn’t care. Someone took notice (not just one, but two and in Math two is more) and I finally get readers. After a while two became three, then four. This made me inspired to write. I’ve already written until the fifth chapter and had the plot all figured out. How each chapter would play out, what the conflict would be, my resolution and finally the not so happily ever after. After posting (or for others ‘publishing’) my sixth chapter the readers stop posting comments, I thought maybe they were busy, it was just a week since I’ve updated and based from experience it usually took about two or three weeks for them to read and comment. So I waited and waited and waited. No comments came, again this made me doubt my story, perhaps it was just interesting to me. Maybe they didn’t think it was funny like I do (hey, you need to admire your own work).

  I still continued posting up to the seventh chapter and still nothing. I started reading other stories in the forum to find out why they have a lot of readers. There wasn’t anything special to them (well except for one story that I became interested in), the plot was cliché, the title wasn’t that catchy and not bragging but I thought I had better grammar. And then one day, I received a PM from one of the frequent writers in the forum, it was a message promoting her work. And it hit me: I need to get my work out there. I made a catchy message shamelessly promoting my story and sent it to everyone. It wasn’t easy since the forum has over 100,000 subscribers.  Active or not, I sent them a PM. 

 The next day I was flooded with replies, some saying they’ll check my story out, some telling me they weren’t into fanfiction and a few who actually wrote me a message telling me that they enjoyed reading my story. I gained about 15 subscribers  just that one day, for a rookie like me 15 is plenty and usually not everybody on the author’s PM list are active in giving comments and I’m glad that all 15 of them bothered writing even a short comment about what I wrote. And my favourite fanfiction writer is one of them, giving me positive feedback and even giving pointers on how to improve my work.

 Now that you know the history of how I began being a fanfiction writer, you’d still probably be confused of the reason I am on edge about not being able to write anything or not able to update. 15 subscribers for me is a lot, and it’s not easy pleasing those 15 people, even though I don’t really care if they think that my story was not heading towards the predictable. You could lose readers if you don’t constantly update. You need to keep them hooked to your story, like watching a TV Drama, if it’s something you anticipate you’d most likely be impatient if something else came up instead of what you wanted to watch.

 As of the moment I might be spending my time doing this blog instead of writing my story’s thirteenth chapter. But that blinking cursor and empty white page is still there.  And my mind is still blank.