It's truly frightening how quickly one light-hearted shitpost turned sour.
I just want to set the record. A lot of things happened very quickly, and I am being held accountable. You can consider this my official response to the complete and utter fiasco that's surrounding me. It's no apology video, but I'm a writer. So let me tell you a story.
It starts all the way back in the spring of 2019 when I was watching CW's Legends of Tomorrow for the first time. I felt nothing but frustration at how underutilized Hawkman and Hawkgirl's wings were. They were completely grounded for a majority of the show and I… I knew I could write better.
At the time, nobody had ever heard of COVID-19. And the discourse was asking writers to be more inclusive of BIPOCs. I loved the idea. I am and have always tried to be an advocate. So I made Sam Farsight, a homeless black bisexual man who became a superhero.
And later… when George Floyd was murdered… I was disgusted with America. I still am. But I was convinced that I was doing the right thing. We NEED more BIPOCs in media. More black characters and more plots focused on the real-world problems BIPOCs face. I was happy to oblige.
I finished the novel in June 2021. I had three Beta readers, one of whom was a professional and one who was black. Between myself, them, and my editors, we continued to refine the novel right up until the day of publication.
On Feburary 1st 2022 I launched the novel. Published through IngramSpark.
I have been taking The Wingman to author events since publication. It outsold many more tenured authors with bigger platforms. Nobody even mentioned the cover. Or, if they did, it was because they thought it was more appealing than my competitors. It wasn't a prefabricated cover. We all thought having something original and stylized far outweighed the clichéd prefabs flooding the market.
On Thursday, April 21, at 08:38am I bought my first Blaze package to test the new feature and compare it to other platforms. I made those records public in the second Blaze post. Long story short, it wasn't very successful. In fact, I got quite a few racist butts who were actively fighting against the post for having a black main character. And, on the other end, we had people issuing death threats because they thought Blazing a post was cheating. In general, nobody interacted with the advertisement.
During all that chaos, I got a couple of posts from people panning the artwork. This in and of itself didn't bother me. Art is subjective. You can hate my cover as much as you like. If anything, my artist was the one who was more injured. She worked hard to create something she thought people would love. And you all crushed her spirit in the most toxic way possible. She, like many people on this hellsite, is an Indie artist trying to punch up into a professional field. This irritated me only because this site is one where artists were supporting one another. The spirit of cooperation and mutual uplift was one I believed everyone here found sacred. Being proven wrong on that front was disheartening. And (since this is my official record) I am ashamed of all of you who dogpiled my artist.
But then we got a special kind of dumbass who seemed to think that the artwork was objectively bad. I.E. they claimed the cover was total dogshit done by an amateur and not worth being published.
Art, like all things, takes time, practice, and passion. And the things this person was complaining about were all things that make virtually zero impact on sales or the enjoyment of the cover. Namely, the hand-drawn style, the font, and "kernelling," being their most ridiculous claims. (And yes, this is how they spelled kerning. Scroll up if you don't believe me.)
It inspired me to craft a shitpost. And then, in the Tumblr spirit of infecting other users with cringe, I Blazed my own shitpost lampooning myself.
At first, people genuinly enjoyed the content. Most people who read it went investigating for themselves and had a laugh at how basic and unremarkable the original post was. The hand-drawn style simply paired poorly with that one person's biased expectations of "my" content. At worst, the cover for The Wingman... was average.
But there are some people who think being average is doing things wrong. It was not long before someone else made the same kind of post as the dumbass before. This time, they even claimed that the CRAYON COVER would've been a better cover for publication. I am not exaggerating. It looked to me like they didn't even READ the post, let alone follow it back to my original, as they claimed.
It is at this point that I want to point out: nobody commenting had even said anything about the quality of my writing.
I will fully admit that I should've left this person alone. But they were in a position to know better. They are a person who works with books directly. And they were straight-up LYING about art just so they could look better by comparison.
I called this person out. And straight-up explained the purpose of my post was to mock people like them who were low-key attacking artists for not having "perfect" art. And, as part of my proving my own credentials on the subject, I made a point to stress that this was not my first rodeo. I am not an amateur, as many people like this were claiming. I didn't just crap out a novel, throw it on Amazon, and start whining about why people don't love me already.
This is where things started spinning out of my control.
Some person reblogged a portion of my response. Cutting it and pasting it in their own reblog. By doing so they "conveniently" left out who I was talking to and why. They were then free to claim that I was responding to some basic criticism.
I do not know if this person was posting in good faith or not. It's possible they didn't understand what was happening and their ignorance led to the rabbit hole that followed.
People in the comments started saying that I was just a whining bitch.
And one person, without giving any additional context, claimed to have "found" my first post (you know, the one that is still LINKED IN THE POST) and that "my" artwork "really was trash."
That's all it took for the new people to start reading the post and accusing me of being a whiny baby who deserves hate. People started dogpiling without reading anything else, without reading any of my responses or the actual criticism leveled against me.
It is my personal opinion that this is the Twitter users showing themselves. But I have haters now who are following my every action to harass me. No doubt, they will take even that basic assumption and twist it out to make me a villain again. But dogpiling like this is a very Twitter-ly response. One person even went so far as to "research" my name to "find" a picture of me to "prove" that I'm not black--despite me repeating this basic information several times publically.
I'm getting hate mail every few minutes.
And right now, I'm exhausted. Unlike Twitter, posts here cycle for years after their posted. The psychological dread of knowing that this one post is going to keep generating toxicity for months… Or that it might never stop… If I wanted that kind of self-loathing I would've just joined Twitter in the first place…
I'm leaving Tumblr for a while… and I don't even know if I'll be back. Thank you so much to everyone who bought The Wingman and to those of you who left kind comments! ^.^ Those words of encouragement made me feel like it actually was still possible to claw together an indie career. I… I'm not giving up.
But I doubt that I'll ever have fun sharing my thoughts on here ever again. This place was supposed to be a place that supports artists and indie creators. A place for clown-on-clown violence where adults consent to self-mockery. But this was crossing the line.
I'm just going to reblog this on the monstrosity and then add it all to the bottom of my queue so everyone who's been my friends will know when I'm out of content…
