Sometimes I like to talk about various anxieties because I know I'm not alone in those thoughts, but also: I'm not saying that those thoughts are correct or rational. And I just realized something about my more recent writing anxieties.
What I did not realize back in the day, back before viable self-publishing really blew up, was HOW MANY people love to write and long to tell their stories, fictional or otherwise.
And I want all those people to write and be read. I want all those voices, I want voices who weren't heard before, either because of systemic marginalization or simply because of basic gatekeeping.
*However,* the overall effect is going from "here is a solar system of big planets: the big books we all read and talk about because that's what the industry selects and promotes, to:
"I am lying on my back in a field looking up at the stars and holy shit, there are so many stars. Hooooly shit, so many. I am an insignificant speck in the universe. Hooooooooooly shit"
And the thing is, I don't want to reverse that. I don't want any of those stars to stop shining. It's a deep anxiety of insignificance that's on *the person feeling it* to deal with.
But I do kind of have to spend less time on social media. I love hearing about the publishing industry, but sometimes... I gotta keep my eyes on my own paper. I have to stop thinking about how small my own star can't help but be in the scheme of things.
This is probably the point where you say something cheesy about you never know who your work might be important to, who might ~wish on your star~ but I find that to be a little twee no matter how true, nonetheless there you go.
In some ways it's just helped to name a nameless, ambient anxiety ("HELP, THERE ARE SO MANY WRITINGS, I AM SO SMALL") so that I can figure out how to cognitively disarm it and drag my attention back to my own paper.
I think that ultimately the fact that *anyone* can write just about anything and put it out there publicly to be read is going to change the face of reading and writing at the level of the invention of the printing press, if not more so. An explosion.
I don't know how the monks were able to sit down and keep illuminating their manuscripts after that. Ultimately, they stopped, you know? But the payoff for the reading public was exponential.
And the world after the printing press is the world we've known. There's going to be a world after the internet press, if you will; we just don't know exactly what that ecosystem will look like. It was the end for the illuminators and the beginning of everything else.
And that nihilistic anxiety of "there is no room for me, and if there is no room then what do I even do" is just something each one of us has to deal with individually, rather than let it turn to jealousy or fear. Which it does for me, sometimes.
(I am very big on "You are going to feel a way about [various forms of decentering] and that's only natural, as long as you deal with it on your own time.")
Basically I don't have any solution to "I am a tiny writerly speck, we are all tiny specks, oh God there are so many of us." Just an acknowledgement that it's natural to feel that way and we just have to figure out how to accept that as the literal economy of it changes.
Re: the monks: I did figure something like this happened, much the way ebooks haven't rendered hard copy extinct. But when I do buy hard copies, they tend to be big beautiful annotated/illustrated books.
And there's the book:
