Learning To Be Thick-Skinned

Have you ever been to the UK? Pig and I have. We lived in Manchester for a year, from 2009-2010, and it was great for inspiring tales of darkness and despair.

So I tapped into a vein of misery and started writing! I wrote a web series full of despair, a dramedy with an LGBTQ+ theme, which filled my days and helped me develop my writing style. It was my first attempt at anything long form. I actually had a lot of fun writing the series but - due to some rookie mistakes and a shitload of anxieties - it turned on me and left me feeling quite downtrodden and useless.

WEB SERIES VS NOVEL

The series surprised me and became quite popular. Readers and random strangers wanted me to compile it all into a novel. I should have said NO. I should have stuck to my guns and just written the series as I envisioned it: a web series.

However, in the the end, I did it. I compiled the web series into a novel and released it on Amazon. I'd like to blame peer pressure and bad advice, but ultimately the decision was all mine. The novel did surprisingly well, with over 10,000 sales, but I made a lot of mistakes.

MY MISTAKES

My mistakes were numerous, but not completely unexpected from a novice writer. They include:

• Pretending to be a British writer just because we were living in the UK at the time.
  • the comments were brutal. People called me vile names, just because I used words like suspenders instead of braces. Or was it the other way round? 🤔 Either way, the voluminous emails were full of hate for every tiny little indiscretion where I let my Aussie upbringing show. How dare such an uncouth convict pretend to be British 😱
• Compiling the series into a novel.
  • I feel now - as I felt then - that a web series and a novel are completely different beasts. The series had a LOT of things going on. Those poor characters suffered way more than any character deserved. It felt like trying to jam a few years of Neighbours into one tiny novel.
• Paying too much attention to feedback.
  • My mental health took a massive hit; however, it was ultimately a good thing. The beginning of self-awareness 👍

There were other more generic mistakes as well, such as rushing the editing and proofreading processes, but every author needs to fuck up at least one book with impatience 😅

THE FEEDBACK

Somebody on Amazon give me 1 star because 'This writer needs to learn how to decline his pronouns'. Huh? They called me illiterate. I had to google declining pronouns to work out what they were referring to, so maybe they had a point. Regardless, the pomposity of the cunt shook me. It was only a trashy novel, not some piece of high literature 😡

Overall, the feedback boiled down to this: The novel was too busy. With hindsight, I could have easily split the series into a trilogy 🤷‍♂️

The way the feedback was presented was cruel. People are arseholes. At that stage in my life, I took every little piece of criticism to heart and let it crush me. Nowadays, with a more positive outlook on life and much greater control over my anxieties, I respond to most criticism with this:

🖕

THE LESSON

The lesson from this? Trust your gut. Stand up for yourself. Pick and choose the opinions which matter to you. That's actually three lessons 🤔 but regardless, the umbrella lesson is this:

JUST BE YOURSELF!