The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I once read this book called 31 Songs by the novelist and music critic Nick Hornby. It features an anecdote where he watches Patti Smith performing live, and he thinks to himself that he wishes music would only be performed by people who are as obviously passionate about their music as Smith is. But then he thinks about this for five minutes, and realises that some of his favourite songs ever were written by people for whom songwriting was a day job; and also there are millions of musicians who are incredibly passionate about their music, but their music sucks. A subjective feeling of "inspiration" on the part of the author doesn't necessarily translate into a work of art which is engaging and compelling for the listener/reader/viewer.
It's very romantic, this idea of great books only being written by people who are extremely emotionally invested in their Art™, but I'm not sure if it describes the reality of the situation. I suspect the average author of Sonic fan fiction is far more emotionally invested in the spiritual journey of his Original Character Do Not Steal than, say, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who pretty much openly stated that the craft of making believable fictional characters is a highly artificial process and no different, really, to what LLMs do. History is littered with examples of authors whose generally-considered magnum opus was written to put food on the table or fulfil a contractual obligation, while the book they poured their heart and soul into is generally considered pretentious, indulgent or masturbatory.
Guess I'm really just projecting from my own experience with art. Whatever the Greeks said about muses feels true; when you can channel that magic inspiration it's like you've made brief contact with the divine and you're just relaying their message. Only when I'm having really strong emotions does my best stuff come out. But everyone's different. I think we just have to find what works for each of us as individuals.
I understand where you're coming from, and obviously you shouldn't be trying to get a book published if you don't believe it's any good. I'd just caution you against assuming that what feels like your "best work" to you will necessarily inspire that reaction in the people who read it. I think you might be surprised by how many books you've enjoyed were written by people who only wrote them to make rent. The example of Melville is well taken, but Dickens and Hugo were paid by the word. On the other end of the spectrum, Kafka was so embarrassed by his novels that he requested they be destroyed posthumously - and isn't the literary world richer that that request was ignored? Think of how much poorer we'd be if we'd trusted his assessment of his own writing ability.
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