#but it's probably very mockable for the exact reason why I never explored proper publishing

[jessielefey]

I just bought a book of poetry.

God grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

And I actually don’t mean that as as much of an insult as it sounds?

It’s just... maybe people were right. Maybe my shit *was* good enough to go into a collection, because this dude whose blog I definitely followed back in ye days of Opendiary dot com did. (That’s conjecture, I can’t actually tell you his diary name from memory, but it *feels* FOD -- and not livejournal or even bloop -- in the way like you can tell a reddit post from a tumblr post just by the way things are phrased.)

Like, I could literally do this, with my shit. My pre-existing shit. It would be just as good, and the only difference is he bothered to do the work to get published and I never did.

It’s weird that I feel like I’m slapping the dude with backhanded compliments, when that’s the opposite way I mean it. I feel a lot better about my writing, because I like this guy’s stuff, and it’s like my writing, and he got published, so I could. Yano? It’s not redefining the genre of poetry, it’s not even really saying anything new; it’s not great, but it’s *good*.

Like this is an entire book of poetry that’s “choice selections from my poetry blog”. And people are buying it. I bought it. It’s just my Bloop diary printed out, complete with the formatting tropes and visual design aesthetics.

I could do that.