Today I had my first really negative experience with business on the internet. I’ve gotten overwhelmingly positive responses to this website, and to my writing so far. I’ve gotten compliments, generated client leads, all with my own writing, and I’ve been incredibly proud of it. And today, someone threw a shoe at me in my blog comments. Not just my blog comments, my first official blog comment here at Cottage Copy. I thought about not letting the comment through, but then decided in the spirit of honesty and fairness and being a bigger person, I would, and just deal with it as is.
Hearing negative stuff about your writing sucks, and everyone goes through it. I love my writing, and other people do as well, but I admit that my personal style can be a little confrontational. I tend to call a spade a spade, I suppose. In fairness, I appreciate when other people do as well, and I’ve got a fairly thick skin (ironic, in terms of this blog post). I also appreciate that this doesn’t work for everyone. I guess the heart of this post is how you deal with that though. What do you do when you feel like trash and you need to get out of it? For me, I tend to go back to Havi’s stuff. I’ll never be as zen as she is in ten million years, but she’s got an amazing way of writing that really helps you work through things. And eventually, I read a lot of things, and did a lot of swearing and coffee drinking, and I came to a conclusion. Nasty comments, and nasty people, are not me. Nasty comments say far more about the person they originate from than anything. I am not related to it in any way, and I don’t need to make it my responsibility.
It comes down to this. Writing is personal. The internet, in many ways, is not. And if I am going to be the pirate queen of this space (and I fully intend to be) I need to stand behind my writing, and my business, and the words I use. I support all of you out there who go through this frequently, and who are successfully lording their pirate-ness over their own domains.
P. S. All thanks to Havi for the zen, the ideas, and the links in this post. You’re wonderful.
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