7 Setback

The Human species had a small problem. Whenever we did something good, we would immediately believe ourselves to be 'better' than others.

It brings in this slow, toxic, lethal poison called comparison.

It was everywhere. If you were happy about getting good grades, you would think it doesn't mean much when you see someone with better grades. If you were happy about this new skill you learned, you would shrug it off when you see someone do it better.

That was just how we worked. Unfortunately, comparison was a poison that hit everyone.

And I was no exception.

Was it just curiosity or did I think I was better than others?

Late at night, I checked the profile of the person who had commented on my novel. The site had a fairly useful feature of making one's reading lists public for others.

I checked just that.

"H-hundred…?"

Books. Dozens of books were listed in their profile. Even though it would usually have comics here, this commenter had been following almost every new book that came out on the platform. But that wasn't what surprised me.

It was the success that most of them had reached. Many of those books had hundreds and hundreds of followers as compared to my measly four. Some of them were even in the thousands.

The shock was quite big. Their views reached hundreds of thousands, while mine barely rounded into to the three digits.

I wanted to bite my lips, but rationality wasn't gone yet. I wasn't that hot headed about things, never had been.

"Must be because I just started…"

As I pondered on that line of thought, my eyes fell on one of the posts the reader had made on their wall.

{I have added a reading list of good new books in the forums! Please check it out!}

"Forums…? The site had forums?"

I learned later that something like forums or some kind of communities were actually pretty common for such sites. Almost essential.

The depths of the internet were barely something I could explore. The forums opened up with a click.

A cookie and cache window popped up. As soon as I accepted all.

I stepped into a different world.

I had walked in the middle of a busy bazaar, a packed marketplace filled to the brim.

{Review Swaps here!}

{Guides for newbies! Very helpful!}

{LF Editor for free. If we make money we'll split}

{Critique my story idea}

{Review for Review}

Dozens of tags, coloring the forum posts with their own sections, flew around like confetti. All of them ready to be filtered at a mouse's click.

{Anyone in for RP with their OCs? (Strictyly PG 13)}

{Review Swap?}

{Why am I not getting readers?}

{Post a snippet of your work!}

The titles of the posts were like calls of hawkers and vendors showcasing their latest wares. The constant dropdown of updates in the forum posts were the crowds of customers moving from one shop to another.

In middle of it all, I felt like a clueless idiot. I was in a country that I didn't speak the language of, and my pockets had a hole in them.

{Reading List of Good New Books this month!}

My eyes fell on the small piece of home in this foreign land. Calling it home was taking it too far, but it was something familiar, and I clicked on it right away. The thread opened up and showed the profile of the same commentor who had previously commented on my book.

It was a list of works that stood out to them, just this month.

This month, that was when I had released my book too.

As some level of thoughtfulness returned, I decided to scroll through the page. It was a pretty extensive post with the reader putting in a lot of effort. They had linked and talked about the ideas of all the novels, what stood out to them, what would stand out to readers, some faults and a prospective future of the book.

They were all new novels, ones I had noticed in the same reader's profile when I was scrolling through it.

{In the end, the best book this month was Great Wolf's latest work.}

But… mine wasn't in there.

It couldn't be because my book was young. There were two works with just two followers, posted yesterday.

It was just one person. Only one reader.

So why did it matter so much?

I knew it shouldn't have. But it still did.

I sighed and went back on the post list. The home page of the forums. My eyes gazed through it all much more calmly this time. As if scrutinizing everything on the list.

"Haah…"

Even though it was time to go to sleep. I closed the browser tabs and switched over to the text editor once more.

{Chapter Nine:}

I put in the title, and started writing.

Ideas did not come to me that easily. I paced around my room, I even switched to YouTube and Instagram multiple times.

Even if I wanted to, getting right to work was impossible. Sticking to it even more so.

What? Was one little problem supposed to make me a raging machine?

I had lived a bland life. If one setback was going to change me, it would have done so long ago.

It was hard to be disciplined. It was hard to change.

Maybe no one changed from a little setback.

But that day… I only slept when I finished the chapter…

***

We have a piano in the studio.

It's nothing fancy. An old ivory Steinway. I was interested in it once, even tried to learn it to play some beautiful compositions.

But learning the scales and the notes, getting my fingers used to the keys and my feet to the pedals.

It was a slow, boring, painful process. One filled with setbacks.

So after three days of facing those setbacks… I quit.

I still wonder why.

I wonder why I quit.