Our society is illiterate. No one reads.
You said it softly.
Also, for most people, reading is an energy-consuming activity, so their brains choose an easier way to enjoy, such as series or movies, and that’s pretty trivial.
So many people still publish books though. They must be selling to to some people. Or do they just buy things that look good on their shelf?
The world started getting really terrible around Trump’s first term and I just kept getting more and more depressed. I went from blogging a couple times a week to once a month to not at all.
Not really trying to become a writer, but I have lots of worldbuilding ideas that I wish I could make interesting to others. I wish I could draw, but there’s a hard limit to what I can do visually, so I’ve had to fall back to writing, sort of. I like writing short character interactions or even just descriptions of an environment, the sort of stuff people would draw.
I have been writing short stories, manuals, news paper articles and wiki like entries in a universe I have been making up for over 7 years now.
While some of the older works are a little out of sync with the current rules and history, I finally found the story in it that I wanted to tell all along!
A month ago it suddenly came to me and the independent stories fell into one big story. The twenty characters collapsed to like five and I have a consistent story outline. It was cathartic!
I really thought I would never make it this far! Something like that can happen even if you just write little pieces. No matter your goal if that happens it is very satisfying.
I agree with all of this. I worked for 10 years as a technical writer (I wanted to be a novelist but bad luck and poor self-control and executive dysfunction prevented me from ever really publishing anything noteworthy). For one thing, actually working as a writer kinda killed the drive for me. I still write for myself, but I have no real aim to get published—in large part because I know very few would ever read anything I wrote, simply because very few people still read. I’m currently shifting careers to something that AI won’t be able to swipe from me, and I’ve honestly been enjoying it a lot more than I ever enjoyed writing, though I loved studying English in school. Working as a writer is just not the same thing as going to school for writing. Working as a writer is just being told to write assignments you don’t really have any interest in day in and day out.
I write fiction like I would write technical documentation or a police report. Nobody would want to read that.
Eh, World building has been rather quiet recently.
This timeline is more batshit crazy than anything I can come up with and I only enjoy writing batshit crazy stuff.
