I sat down in the cushy chair, the dim screen of my laptop illuminating my trembling hands.

I tried to ignore the orange notification bell, and failed.

I glared at it. I already knew what it was going to say - so why was I postponing it?

With a sigh, I moved my cursor over and clicked it.

"You have earned an achievement! Group Leader VII: Have 1000 followers on any fiction!"

I dragged a hand over my face, groaning. A thousand people were following this trash?

I glared at the source of my annoyance and sadness. 'Life of a Grimoire'. If only I knew how much I would begin to dread writing this story.

Standing, I went into the kitchen and selected a glass, filling it with lemonade and leaning against the counter like I'd done a hundred times.

Every word of those half-star reviews I could remember. Every single word.

Every sentence in the destructive comments.

Every mistake I made in the early chapters, with characters, with the plot.

I made a decision.

Going back to my laptop, I sat down and moved the cursor over the 'delete' button on Chapter One.

I paused. Knowledge Reigns Supreme. Why was I acting without all the facts?

Clicking on the button marked 'Write', I scrolled down past my passion project, Infamous, and looked at Life of a Grimoire.

One thousand twenty followers.

Two hundred favorites.

Two hundred and eleven ratings.

And three hundred -

Wait a minute. What?

I flicked back to the ratings, rapidly checking the three-digit number on my overall rating. Four point nineteen.

Leaning forwards, I steepled my fingers, thinking.

Of course people would leave a bad review if they hated it. Of course people would leave a comment describing my awful prose and character development. Who would write a comment saying they enjoyed it?

And yet there it was, a small counter on my dim screen stating that one thousand and twenty people enjoyed my book. That two hundred people exactly thought it wasn't trash.

I moved the cursor away from the 'Delete' button and hit comments. Three hundred sixty seven.

I scrolled through them, and didn't get very far before I found one.

A comment from a RoyalRoader named Saint BobJoe left on chapter sixteen.

Dude, you didn't mess up. Have high standards for yourself but don't beat yourself down when you fail to meet them. That be the way that leads to mental health issues.

Sure, the constant rewinding was annoying (not a failure), but now this annoyance has a face, which is genuinely trying to do good but not as well as he could have. It's an interesting new character!

Trust me, I wouldn't have read this much of a crappy story. You did good. Be generous with yourself when reviewing your achievements, and have fun when you write.

I smiled. I thought I was going to rewrite this to satisfy the four (I'd counted several times) negative reviews? What was four compared to a thousand?

Those four people would likely never know how much I had come to despise even looking at the story. How much they'd made me hate my own style. How often I'd considered dropping the story for good because of it.

After all, they dropped the story. That meant it wasn't good, right?

One thousand twenty. That's quite a lot of people.

I began to type. There was no way that the one thousand and twenty could hear it, but...

"Thanks, guys. I really needed that."