Maria

Fuck up the way you paint your nails. Fuck up how you dye your hair. Laugh as you realize you missed a massive step in making bread. Scribble terribly in your notebook and CSP. Snort at how ugly the first clay figure you make is. Add glitter. Add spice. Make the wrong choice and laugh about how bad it got. Embrace that you're new and mistakes are needed. Embrace that you're a veteran and mistakes are always going to be there.

There's no cameras. The world isn't watching every eraser mark and every misstep. The universe loves you and loves seeing you learn in the way and time that you need. The stars love to see how you laugh and show off the good AND the bad.

At first I stayed quiet, not wanting to bring it up because I know it’ll just cause more people to scrape my works.

But I’m so tired. I’m tired of my hard work being stolen. Why do you do this to us? Haven’t I given you enough free stories? Do you know how much I love all of you, how happy it made me when people commented on my fics and said they liked them?

Now that AI is more popular, I’ve seen in real time how people started treating writers like they were just a content farm. People abandon us or feed our works into AI if we don’t pump out stories fast enough.

It’s exhausting. The last few years I wrote so much that I ended incredibly burnt out to the point I’ve barely written anything in the past few months, but it’s still not enough.

Nothing is enough.