Champagne And Bouchées! To Your Successes!
Creator: Gerard van Honthorst (1592–1656) | Credit: Wikimedia Commons
To hell with the naysayers and broken people whose lives are as rotten as the stench of their online presence.
Indeed, very few genuinely want you to win, and the others’ tactics consist of downplaying the sheer scope of your accomplishments through demeaning behavioral patterns.
BRAG ABOUT IT!
You’re a published author with a platform! You have finished manuscripts and more brilliant premises sitting in your vault!
You’ve done something notable, something very few have, often with limited resources and connections. You didn’t just string words together—you built a cohesive narrative with an intricate world and fleshed-out characters uplifted by exciting dialogue.
Let that sit for a second.
Right?
The fact that you embraced eternal suffering like Dante’s Inferno, going through each round of rewrites, revisions, and proofreading, knowing that you will have to continue chipping at the stone for months in the hope of attaining the perfect shape, details, and proportions.
That fact alone. Wow.
Writing is difficult. It requires patience and highly specialized skillsets.
It is tedious and at times painful. It demands a brain that can rearrange concepts, characters, and locations into a sophisticated account that appeals to the soul.
How can you not see?
What you’re doing is nothing short of extraordinary.
You deserve to be celebrated. But similar to relationship dynamics, you can’t receive love if you don’t love yourself first.
Online spaces have been quite the disruption since their emergence; review-bombing and harassment are common practices in toxic spaces such as Goodreads or BookTok.
You are constantly told to dream smaller, to play safe, to follow what sells, to avoid certain topics like the plague. And all those self-imposed rules suffocate you.
You feel like you shouldn’t make waves. That being proud of your work and your intelligence is a manifestation of some form of superiority complex? Or that you may be a narcissist (a blanket term used by those with no background in psychology when they run out of flawed arguments) or simply pretentious?
Cockiness and confidence are not mutually exclusive; you can be one without the other.
And the pride you take in the things you’ve built is a must, as you MUST champion your works before anyone else does.
Be loud! Be colorful! Pour yourself a glass of champagne as you approach your next release.
You did it! And none of these zombified trolls can compete with your imagination and your pen, a timeless legacy only you can leave behind.
You are winning. Leave the slow ones in the dirt. They’ll either catch up and repent or seek their next target.
