I don't know who I am writing this for, but I feel a need to write it and get it out of my system. I guess it's half update and half explanation, because I am aware I have been out of action for a while now and I am sick of posting excuses while avoiding giving a real explanation. I'll put the main points in a tl;dr final paragraph at the end. First of all, I am really really sorry for the lack of updates on my original fiction. I am embarrassed by the fact they have been abandoned for so long, and I am really sorry to have kept people waiting for so long. It's probably obvious enough to anyone who reads my work or follows me anywhere, but my mental health is really not great. Part of the reason I started to write is that I find it helps me, but there have and always will be times where things are particularly bad for me, and the past couple of years have been particularly awful (for the entire world, I appreciate I'm not the only one and I guess that is part of why I am finally sharing this).
There are things I can't go into because it wouldn't be appropriate, but as anyone who has written for Resurgence for a while will be aware, there was a breakdown in relations between one of the co-founders and the rest of the team last year. This breakdown was deeply unfortunate, and difficult on both a personal and professional level for everybody. I am aware of some of the things that were said about (and done to me), I am aware that a lot of people believe those things about me because I never spoke out about it or defended myself. It has always been my belief that the truth will speak for itself.
I guess it is naïve of me, but I feel that when someone is so publicly open about things such as having hacked my email, logic should dictate that they may not have been in the most stable of places, and that the things they were accusing me of may have been coming from a place of ill-health. I don't hold it against her. But I know sides were taken, and that I am really not a charismatic figure. I'm blunt, I am easily frustrated, and I am boring: I am not someone people tend to side with. I've spent most of the past 3 years working 70+ hours a week to bring Resurgence to life and help it grow. I was not alone in bringing it to life, but I am still not paid for what I do, and I have been classed as LCWRA (i.e severely disabled) and advised not to work by my doctor. I have been on suicide watch for over a year at this point. I spent over a month recently hiding under my duvet and unable to get out of bed for anything other than using the toilet. But when I spent a couple of months working 10-20 hours a week, the result was logging in to social media to see people openly complaining about me being lazy, and being sent screenshots of people making disparaging comments about me. I'm sort of forced to work this many hours promoting other people's work, because we're not at a point where I can pay for high-quality content creation AND adverts, and it wouldn't be right to keep taking time off when it is impacting on the way authors perceive the company, so I have to make the content.
And I am fine with that, most of the time, but every now and then I will see someone frustrated that I didn't choose their book for something, or complaining that we're a shitty platform for x, y, or z reason when they haven't self-promoted in months, or abandoned the book they're expecting us to promote.
For the past couple of months I have been trying desperately to get people to work with me to promote their books. I try to reach out to people individually, or in our groups etc, and until recently all I got was crickets. I struggle so deeply with how to connect with other human beings that I have no idea what I can do differently, or how I can possibly approach this without outright yelling "you don't have to like me, you just have to send me that same fan-art you just shared on your account to post on the page".
My solution was to pay someone else to get in touch with people on my behalf: humiliating, but depressingly effective. That money could have been spent on ads, but when people weren't responding there was no-one left to promote who hadn't been promoted extensively already.
Resurgence means a great deal to me. I am extremely proud that we have been able to build this platform alongside my wonderful cofounders with support from our readers and authors, and I am really pleased to see how well we have been doing (particularly the past 4 months which have seen an uptick in both readers and authors). I didn't pour this much time and effort into the platform for financial gain, respect, or social clout: my personal motivation as a cofounder was to dedicate myself to this because I wanted to provide a place where people can share high-quality work in a serialized format without being exploited. I think that is really important, and when I look through the books we have on our roster, I am so proud of the quality of the work we share. It keeps me going. It just really, really sucks to know that for whatever reason (whether it's because of the things that were said about me, or just because I am a boring neurospicy bitch) some of the people I am trying to uplift dislike me as a human being.
I cannot, do not want, and am not trying to force myself into a friendship with anyone. That's not what this is about. It's just particularly difficult to get up in the morning and spend all day working to promote people when I am aware that some of them don't consider all the time and energy I spend on that, at the expense of working on my own books, when they are questioning my integrity.
On the off-chance that anybody actually reads this, I want to make it clear that a lot of people are wonderful to work with and are not causing problems on any level. But as an example of what I am talking about here - someone recently made an official complaint about me to my co-founders based on a comment someone else made on my private Instagram account. The complaint was that I (not the person who actually commented) give them an "ick feeling" because I was being "disrespectful about our authors" in the comment (which again, I had not made). I had to send pages of personal messages as evidence that we were actually just talking about an in-joke (about a really embarrassing crush I have on a fictional character), and doing that was particularly humiliating when whoever that was is unlikely to change their mind about me if that was the conclusion they leapt to and felt so strongly about.
I'm a weird person. I'm neurodiverse, in a way that makes it hard for me to connect with other people. I don't try to hide that, but when I am so clearly putting out "ick" signals I then have to moderate everything I say and do, while being aware that posting nothing at all is just going to loop right back to people assuming I am doing nothing. That is exhausting.
There is other stuff going on - which I really don't think it would be right to go into fully - but as an indication of the severity of this, one issue resulted in me meeting representatives of the UK government to explain why I was shocked that as an applicant in a government run competition for funding underrepresented co-founders, I was told we weren't getting funding because "all stories must have a masculine protagonist to be of value to the reader" (I fucking wish I was joking). They apologised, called me brave, and told me they would ensure the project was funded in the next round if I agreed not to make the complaint and comments official or public. It was not funded in the next round. The people who are frustrated by me don't know about that or any of the other equally draining issues I am trying to navigate right now, and I am trying to remind myself that maybe they wouldn't be so quick to gossip or make complaints if they were aware of things like that. I've shared all of this on my author page, in my capacity as an author. I'm sharing it because I am so deeply ashamed of the fact I have not been able to complete my books - some of which have been going on for years at this point. It's awful to know I am the subject of gossip, and that there are some (albeit not many) people who are following me only to look for things to criticize or mock.
Sharing work publicly is an act of bravery for any author - updating my books when there is a very real risk people might mock me for them is not something I have been able to do. I am not in a place where I could ignore that or find the humour in it. I recently shared some fanfiction on the app, because I am significantly less likely to get upset by people making fun of that, and I am really grateful to everybody who has followed, commented on, or messaged about that because it has helped me a lot with moving past my fear of sharing chapter updates. If people can enjoy a stupid fic about one of the most widely reviled video game characters of all time, I guess they can enjoy my original work.
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