This post is gonna be first-world problems at its finest lol.

Ever since I finished TIOG, I've been thinking a lot about what type of writer I am. After a while, I decided that I'm a self-indulgent writer. I write what I want to write because it makes me happy. If it's anywhere near decent, people will check it out and then everything's good. Until it isn't.

Okay, let me explain this better.

TIOG was my peak creativity. It's wildly out there and weird and nothing like what I've written before. It's an outlier, it's abnormal. I had so much fun with it because it was like that and I got to explore elements I've never visited before, but... that spark is gone.

I'm burnt out. I feel like if I explain this to someone, they'll tell me to wait it out and allow myself some time to regather my thoughts so I can prepare for my next creative, original, innovative fanfic.

Is it selfish of me to think people expect high-quality content from me now? Probably. Yeah, it is. I sound like a narcissist, ugh. But the thing is, is that I feel like there's that pressure now to be super amazing or be nothing.

And, to be frank, I hate that. The reason I stopped writing one-shots way back when was because I realized I was writing for other people instead of myself, so I gave up. To me, there's no reason for writing if I'm not satisfying myself.

I don't want to write a crazy-ass story like TIOG again. Sorry to the people who started following me expecting more fics like it, but it's very unlikely to happen again. I sailed those waters, got my fill, and I'm happy to retire from that genre. At least for a while. I hadn't touched fantasy in over five years before I started TIOG again because I'd burnt out on it back when I obsessively wrote LOTR fanfiction as an 11-year-old.

TIOG was overly complicated, so naturally, I only want to write the simplest thing I could possibly imagine right now. I've been holding off on CC because I want to write that when I feel passion for it. That time's probably going to be in December when I'm doing another project on coral bleaching for college, but that's far away from now.

I write to de-stress. It's a great hobby for that. And what have I been writing since TIOG ended to help keep my mind active?

A Gym Badge-collecting fic. I can hear the collective round of sighs already lol.

I've always told myself I'd write a GBC fic, and, well, now I am. I'm actually amazed at how easy it is to write this fic because I've been able to write three chapters in two days. That's unheard of for me considering how it usually takes me 1.5 weeks just to finish one.

Here's the catch, though: this fic most likely won't ever see the light of being published.

Well, at least not here on Wattpad. Not a lot of people here look fondly upon GBC fics. They're seen as boring and basic and, after coming off of TIOG, a "downgrade." I don't want to deal with that negativity, so I won't. If the fic ever goes live, it's going up anonymously on my private AO3 account.

This post was inspired by a r/Fanfiction thread posted the other day about how polarizing self-inserts are, and a couple of users made great comments about the state of the fanfic community—

And that's the tea 🐸

I feel like that one chick in Mean Girls crying about why everyone can't get along lmaoooo