I know I'm late to this but I do wanna add something to #HarshWritingAdvice:

Writers in your community will measure your value by whether you've sold your fiction, how often you sell it, and how much money you got for it.

This is bull---- and you should avoid this thinking.

What those writers won't say is that they're measuring their own value & worth by these things as well. Sometimes it's unconscious, sometimes not.

What they also won't tell you is that their own self-esteem doesn't go up no matter how many things they sell. Yet they persist.

Instead of realizing that external things like sales cannot fill the empty hole at the center of their soul & won't silence the internal voices telling them that they're nothing, they double down by continuing to pursue the external validation & by pushing this idea onto others.

The harder they can judge and dismiss you for not having sold or made "enough" to be of value to them, the more they can pretend that they're somehow better than you, and put a tiny pebble in that hole in the soul.

This is toxic.

And you don't have to engage with it.

Your value & worth as a person and as a writer are not in any way tied to how many fictions you have written or sold, nor to how much you made from those fictions, be it more or less than that other writer you know. Hold that in your heart and you'll be good.

#HarshWritingAdvice