Eternal Love

Take my gay cats, Tumblr!

Turtle Quilt by Laurraine Yuyama

So I've just posted the last chapter of my ONE HUNDREDTH Call the Midwife fic (terrifying but true).

Here are a couple more scary facts and a couple just for interest:

Total number of words - 659,288 (which equates to approximately 7.3 novels)

My first CtM fic was posted on 02/08/2014 and was A Careful Eye

The longest single fic is The Ground of Mercy

Unlocked received the most Kudos and More Than Human the most comments

The most recent fic is The Odd Couple - Part 1 and as the name suggests there's more to come!

Thank you so much to everyone who's popped in or been there for the whole journey - while I joke that I only write because I struggle to find the fic I want to read, it's you guys who help me justify the time and effort involved.

You have to remember: People are being paid a lot of money to use the most powerful tools in the history of the world to capture your attention, and then they are giving you access to those tools for free.

(This should give you some idea just how valuable your attention is.)

So the first thing I'd say is that you should not be too hard on yourself that you spend a lot of time scrolling. Scrolling is incredibly and (literally) unprecedentedly good at distracting us from boredom or ennui or whatever else we would otherwise be feeling.

Walking and writing, meanwhile, are much less good at distraction. They are better than staring at the ceiling, maybe, but not better than Instagram or Tiktok.

The problem, which you point out above, is that Instagram and Tiktok both solve for anxiety/boredom/isolation in the short run and worsen anxiety/boredom/isolation in the long run. And so you have to make incredibly difficult, counterintuitive decisions to resist the most powerful attention-holding tools ever created.