I cannot write…

It's already been two months since the last time I posted a chapter. The thing is, I was going to write one two days after the last one, but I couldn't, and I want to explain why.

Back when I began writing I was naive enough to think that I would be able to ignore my ratings and popularity (I never expected those to be high). But as people kept pointing out the things that were wrong in what I had written (mostly Arana) and my ratings began to decline, I'm ashamed to admit that I became obsessed with ratings and with any criticism.

The worst part is that I became very resentful of other stories when I saw them get away with stuff that I believed to be much worse than the things I was constantly being criticized for (the 'humans suck trope' being the most prominent example). That reached its peak when I saw that a story that I honestly consider a contender for the worst I've ever read had a rating of 4.7. I ended up losing my cool and leaving some nasty comments that escalated into a full fight. As much as I try to forget about that incident the truth is that I'm not over it at all...

And here's the issue, in a site with standards as low as this one, where so many bad novels get ratings of 4.7 or even 4.8, what does it mean to have a rating of 4.5? And the truth that I'm forced to admit is that my novel is garbage, and when I try writing a chapter I'm forced to recognize that every single sentence I write is awful. I can try to tell myself that ratings don't matter as much as I want, but that won't change the fact that this story I'm writing is really, really bad.

So most days I wake up thinking "TODAY is the day I'll finally write my next chapter, I'll just keep all negative thoughts away and focus on writing", then after writing a sentence or two I remember the fact that my novel is awful and the fact that I'm posting it in a site where 99% of stories are about justifying genocide against 'humans' and cannot bring myself to continue, but then I think "it's ok, TOMORROW I'll write it for sure". That is the loop I've gotten trapped in several times this year, and I've been trapped in it for the last two months...

Many times I thought that I could just power through it. I also thought that if I posted a rant about my most hated trope to get it out of me it would stop bothering me so much, but it didn't work... I don't know what to do anymore, there's so much stuff I have planned that I still want to write about even if it's bad, but I just can't do it...