>>56959512Okay, I was saving this for the very end of the thread because I didn't want to clutter it up like last time, but I feel like I should respond to this.
If you define every itsy bitsy little stepping stone as a success, then of course you'll be succeeding all the time. Simply making progress is a very broad definition of success and I don't think it works for most people. You can have more to show for your efforts, but if others aren't responding in a manner that would suggest so (i.e attention), I wouldn't call that success. Box office bombs still often take a lot of effort and creativity to develop, but they still aren't critically received well. You succeeded not because of your hard work but because you managed to garner an unparalleled fanbase within this thread to the point that you actively make all other works look worse in comparison. The journey isn't the success, the destination is, and sometimes you fail to reach the destination. Yeah, I might have reached 30K words and am on track to publish the longest singular work in the thread's history, but what good was all of that work if it doesn't make a splash? If I aim for critical reception and don't get it, wouldn't you call that a failure?
