Hello! Yes, I know that I have been absent. My classes for this semester have required a lot of reading, which leaves me very little time to take care of myself, much less make a blog post. I’ve also been dealing with some personal issues, which is still ongoing, but I will try my best to focus on those who matter to me and what I love to do, hence my return.
Let me give you a little bit of background before I jump right in. Wattpad is a website where you can read free ebooks, specifically made by other users. It is similar to other websites such as fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3), which I also posted this story on. I mainly wanted to focus on Wattpad because I found it easier to post my chapters on there, so most of what I wrote is on there. Wattpad is particularly known for cringey One Direction fanfictions (kidnapping and adopting comes to mind), as well as those smut one-shots that definitely should not be looked at by 12 year olds. (I can never look at a lemon the same way ever again.)
I made an account there around 2016. I was 16 at the time, on a ton of medications and my dreams day by day were crashing and burning. Seeing as I was mostly at my house because I thought someone was out to kill me at the time (turns out I’m not that special), I figured I would mess around and post some short stories on there. They started mostly with cringey mental illness hot takes, which was me projecting to the internet my problems with a hint of, “graphic design,” on the cover.
But what really got a lot more response then I was expecting was a fanfiction I wrote about BBC Sherlock. It started off with a few chapters with little to no planning, and slowly evolved into what I was planning to be a trilogy. Unfortunately, I still have the ending planned for book two, I have for years, but have not published it as of yet, seeing as my love for BBC Sherlock died as the seasons got worse and worse as Moffat had more and more bullshit excuses.
Granted, at the time, I was just goofing off, writing chapter by chapter and thinking it was garbage. I still think it’s garbage. But apparently Wattpad is full of racoons because they loved it. Last time I checked, I had around 10k reads on there and a few hundred likes. I still get notifications from Wattpad on my email, which is a constant reminder that my teen self is being perceived (much to my displeasure) and the cycle of obsession continues on to this day.
The first thing I notice immediately is that Wattpad has one of those sliding screens on the top featuring their publishing company. Which honestly, I’m unsure how I feel about it. I know when I was younger, I was desperate to have something published, hell even a Wattpad award of some sort (like a Watty), but as a publishing company, I can’t imagine them being taken seriously. Now keep in mind, this isn’t me talking badly about writers as a whole online. I’ve read some very great stories and fanfictions on there. But with a lot of these kinds of websites, they tend to be a dime a dozen. Every fifty fanfictions about Louis Tomilson marrying a fan (who is aged as an adult but is definitely a 12 year old’s self insert) there’s one good fanfiction that’s better then the actual content it came from.
I also notice there is a premium function and…coins??? I have heard of this before, but I can’t imagine paying for premium to buy a book instead of just going online to buy an e-book membership of any other major book company instead. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the FREE books I read on there cost “coins,” now. Now keep in mind, some of these writers definitely deserve it. It takes a lot of time to write a novel, especially if you’re expected to post on a weekly basis. But I think the real whiplash isn’t the authors trying to make money, but Wattpad taking itself too seriously.
It says here that I have two messages in my inbox and 365 notifications. Even now, after all these years, I still panic when I see notifications on there. Because it isn’t just someone liking an instagram post. These people are reading what I wrote at 16-17 years old, and commenting on it without knowing me at all. I literally feel sick as I’m scrolling through the notifications. This is what I get for being a people pleaser.
The first fanfiction I wrote has 26 chapters, 35,200 reads and 1,300 likes. The second one of that series was not completed, but has 11 chapters and 1,000 reads. Although it was very common for me to feel anxious a lot due to the open criticism aspect of my writing there, I also felt immense joy seeing how much people enjoyed it. Writing online actually made me feel like I had a purpose when all my plans were falling apart, which was a huge reason why I’m still alive to this day. As I’m even writing on here and scrolling through Wattpad, I feel an immense pain in my chest and I’m struggling to breathe but at the same time feel immense nostalgia.
I’ve been blogging on this website for over a year now, and to be quite honest, I struggle immensely with not only learning online marketing, but also feeling like I’m, “good enough,” or if writing on here is worth it. At some point I would love to invest more time and even some money on writing online, but the mere idea is a lot.
I would love to write more than just book tags and reviews. But with college, constant doctors appointments, friends, family, and more, there is only so much I have time for at the moment.
If anything, looking through this Wattpad account has taught me that I should, at the very least, keep writing online. Maybe even look through my old works and publish it on here too. It’s not because I’m the “best,” at it. I don’t have to be the best. But because I like to do it.
rachel hall 