>>75681089Wait, no, let me be clear.
There was a point where I began writing for the thread rather than for myself. When I was still working on The Hormoning, which admittedly, went nowhere, I was heavily discouraged by the 'No sex, it's shit.' comments. I thought of the Hormoning as this wacky erotic comedfy fic where a bunch of wacky hijinks ensued, but I did falter after getting called out.
As for BH, I had the same issue where I was partly frozen by the thought that I wasn't pleasing the thread, and that I wasn't developing the story how I wanted to. Marine had, originally, an infinitely more sympathetic but still selfish angle that I never developed, because hey, there's no sex, it's shit.
In a way, that one anon who told me 'Nothings happening in this chapter' helped me realize that I had to do a sort of Chekhov's gun kind of thing, where if nothing is happening, it must be the means for something happening later.
At last I found a sweet spot with ALS, where I put the smut where I knew it would fit best, as well as having all the previously deleted scenes that I thought were parts where I was too self-indulgent and 'nothing happened', but still giving them enough leverage over the story and I was still writing what I wanted.
This post was probably terribly scatterbrained, I'm sick and I'll probably cringe at this in the morning.
TL;DR, I had to relearn to write for myself while imposing an objective degree of quality over my own works.
I never expected to mature in this hobby by writing fucking fanfiction, but hey, here we are. 