06-28-2019, 06:13 PM
No, I'm not asking for nine full essays.
I quote myself:
"Also bear in mind that each overarching "question" has numerous sub-questions in it not because you have to individually answer all of them, but because they are meant to inspire you and give you a general feel for what I'm getting at and what I'd like you to talk about. Feel free to go beyond what I'm asking or focus on specific parts of it. Thank you."
What I expect to receive in total from one participant is one or two standard pages tops, all of the sections combined. So essentially one short essay. Again, like I've said earlier today - about an hour or two of time for most people, I assume.
I'm not beginning with a full-length book either. I have over a decade of on and off practice behind me. Thousands of pages of stuff I have deleted by now, because it wasn't good enough to be worth preserving in my eyes. My early works were all in my native language and they are gone. Most of the stuff in English that came after it is also gone, I think, but I could be seriously surprised when sifting through the contents of one of my external drives. Mostly it was just fiction, too. All the piles of "essays" I've written were for specific online debates. Subreddits, forums, Discord servers or even private conversations, that sort of thing - and guess what, most of them no longer exist. I've only ever backed up a handful of those and I might still have one or two somewhere. I guess I could try to dig something up. I should also still have a few short stories that have survived the purges, all of them a few years old at this point and thus not entirely representative. Again, I'm not a native speaker, so it's as much about my grasp of the language as it is about my writing skills. The former is still in the process of improving as I'm largely self-taught.
The best I can do is unearth one of the few old pieces I have lying somewhere on an external drive and give it a quick make-over to bring it more up to date. Alternatively, I am willing to take a request. You'll give me a topic for an essay, I'll produce something and post it. That way it will be as fresh and representative as it gets.
It's a shame that because of deleted forums I have lost contact with multiple people I used to talk to. It's a shame some people I used to know blocked me for petty reasons. They would have been perfectly sufficient for this purpose and likely up to the task. The only reason I'm asking complete strangers is because I have nowhere else to go at this point. I join some forum, talk to people for a few months, things get quiet, I get busy with real life, come back six or twelve months later and the forum is gone. My original plan was to first ask on a local forum, where I used to post several months ago and was in touch with one moderator. Guess what, the day I came here I tried to go there first and found out it's just gone. As you can imagine, I'm also tired of always investing time into some new community, only for it to get shut down or fall apart like a year later. The same with people, I've invested a ton of time into separate individuals, only for them to throw it all away in the end as if it all meant nothing or for them to turn out to be... rather unsavory characters. I've had that happen so many times over the last few years it's not even funny anymore. Hence why I didn't even bother to first fully establish my presence here and instead went straight to business. I guess I'm getting more cynical about this whole thing and I apologize if it came across as rude and intrusive.
This place was just a back-up plan for me. My original intention was to go here later with a finished product to promote it in the English-speaking zoo circles. As it stands, I'm reconsidering this thing. This was all supposed to be a relatively smooth sailing (with the now nonexistent community) and I'm not sure anymore if this spur-of-the-moment idea is going to work out. Probably not, all things considered. Yesterday was a crushing disappointment, when I found out the old place is no more, and today isn't shaping up too well either as it seems.
Oh well. If at least a handful of willing participants comes along, I'll do the whole essay on request thing, if you want me to. Or revisit one of the old works. It will be worth it at that point. As it stands, it's probably not. I'm very sure you have your reasons, I'm sure they are good reasons, and I hold none of that against any of you. I'm not entitled to your cooperation. And I mean that in a plural sense.
Here's one last idea of mine, something I'm not even sure about. I still have a lot of work to do with sources, additional edits, and so on. I need to get a cover art as well. The idea with interviews is something I can easily tack-on at the very end, once virtually everything is done. So potentially, I could use this time to gain presence and hopefully a degree of respect here so that when the time comes, people will be more cooperative. But, again, I'm not sure whether it will produce results.
So yeah, these are my thoughts for now. My bag and a half of cents. I'm sorry if I'm being a nuisance. I haven't come here to cause upheaval even though it may seem like it at this point.
