Good for you. I don't like being reminded of how much I sucked before I got the general hang of it. I don't like keeping around stuff like 250 pages of a really bad work-in-progress fantasy novel in my first language that I worked on in my early to mid teens and never finished. I deleted that a number of years ago in one of the many purges. It always felt nice to leave the old crap behind. Like I said, I haven't published anything yet. This will be the first thing I do that with because this last half a year or so has been the first time in my life, when I have been capable of being continuously productive in a focused fashion.
It's not my habit to just randomly tell people about my personal problems for the sake of context, but if you want "logic", sure. For a significant portion of my teens I have been dealing with really bad depression and anxiety, I developed eating disorders with which I struggled for years, I've had persistent digestive issues and I'm still dealing with the remnants of that, and some of the resulting symptoms were chronic fatigue, brainfog, et cetera. Towards the end my mental problems even spilled over into a mild gender dysphoria that is fortunately completely gone now. In other words, being creative was exceptionally difficult. Usually I had at best a few months at a time, when I was just furiously creative and wrote all the time, writing a big chunk of a project and then everything ground to a halt again for one reason or another - typically my mental health going down the drain again and me being too tired and depressed to do anything productive. As a result, up until now I have never finished anything substantial like a book, only smaller things. I did get a fair amount of practice overall, but it never went anywhere. To contrast things a bit, I have first set the goal of writing a book for myself when I was about 15 I think. In the beginning of this year, I have done it again. I've said to myself that by the end of the year I'm going to have a book. And now I'm doing a second edit of the manuscript and adding sources. That's because my overall health is finally worth a damn and I can actually work on multiple things simultaneously. Like working a day job, as I have for 5 years now, and also writing in my off-time. I'm finally even remotely happy and looking back a lot of it feels like a surreal nightmare.
Because it may not be very obvious, here's another reason I have been quick to destroy a lot of my works. Like I said, I was very depressed a lot of the time, to the point where living just feels either like maddening numbness or just a whole lot of pain. That sort of thing invariably makes you pretty edgy as a person - and I was just that. So a significant portion of that stuff was just excessively dark in tone with self-serving extreme violence and all the rest of it, I was just venting at that point. Those are not the kinds of keepsakes I like to keep around either. I'm glad all of that is gone and I don't need any reminders of it, because in my normal healthy state of mind I don't like that sort of stuff at all. Though it's true that two of the stories I did keep so far are of the dark variety. But anyway, these past few years I've slowly been getting better and now I'm finally ready to do something. With or without you. And we both know it's going to be the latter.
I'm done with this thread, because no matter how much more time I commit to it, it's not going to go anywhere. That much is clear. There's only one way to prove all of you wrong and that is to put up. I'll keep this account and drop by when my project is done. Dunno when exactly will that be, but the sooner I stop writing exhaustive replies nobody cares about or really interfaces with, the sooner I'll be done with it.
Before I go, here's something I wanted to say. One of the reasons I'm doing this is because I can't stand looking at people like you (plural) - often good, decent people - living in perpetual misery and paranoia. Ever since I've joined my first community like this when I was about 13 I've been watching men living crippled by fear and unable - but typically also unwilling - to do anything about it. Bitter, lonely, resentful, terrified of everyone around them, often including their own families and human partners. It's quite the sad sight to behold and I mean that genuinely, not as a snarky remark. I have many reasons motivating me, but this is one of them. I'll be damned if I don't try to do at least something. I'll see you all when I do just that.
