So Back Flow wasn't perfect - and I don't even mean that in the sense of the "isn't The Perfect And Unproblematic Representation To End All Representations" disclaimer that we have to slap on everything written by marginalized writers nowadays to stop the media police from coming down on our heads. It had some janky grammatical bits, a few too many paragraph breaks for my taste, and although the ending was sweet, it was also kind of abrupt. In other words, it's not something that'd get nominated for a Hugo.
But you know what it was? It was a fun read. More than that, it was a happy read. It was a sweet and straightforward story about people figuring things out about themselves and being good to each other, in a world that still had problems but was still more open than our own. My day was better off for reading it, which is more than I can say for a bunch of Award-Winning Novels.
Which made me think... actually, I don't want to write an Award-Winning Story. I don't want to write the next Hugo or be the next Brandon Sanderson. I want to write fun, flawed, and indulgent stuff and entertain myself with wordplay while I'm at it. I wanna write stuff like this!
And you know, we've been realizing that a lot of writing resources and advice and discussions... have been poisonous to us, actually? Not in an intentional way (well, sometimes in an intentional way) but like, growing up, we wanted to be A Writer, and we read so many Writing Advice Sites about like, How To Make Your Character Complex And Not A Mary Sue, or How To Create Deep And Compelling Conflicts, or How To Make Your Setting Realistic And Believable, or How To Pitch Your Stories To Publishers (Because Obviously Every Writer Wants To Be Traditionally Published) and... somewhere along the line, we forgot the most important thing of all, which is that first and foremost, writing should be fun and you should write stuff not to Write A Marketable Or Even Good Story but because you enjoy writing that stuff.
I want to have fun with writing again. I want to write stuff that I want to read again. I hope I can figure out how.
(also, honestly? the whole idea that it's more important to read/write Good stuff than fun stuff is scuffed to all hell)
(fallen london stamps by