Cannot Please Everyone All the Time
- Shannon Smith
- Apr 15
- 2 min read
Hello Dreamers,
Some of you are fans of Champion of Seasons, others Whispers of the Abyss. One's YA high-fantasy and the other is Lovecraftian smut - not a lot of overlap in the kind of people that favour one over the other.
That's OK. We all have different preferences, interests, and tolerances. In fact, some of you reading follow my writing work, and others my twitch streams. If your reading this its likely the former, though my blog does get posted onto the Discord server that I created to complement the Twitch channel.
Fragmented Community
This means that I'm trying to maintain separate personas and channels to appease different market segments - I just vommed in my mouth writing that. While both are me with no keyfabe, trying to keep the two separate is exhausting and disheartening.
Why?
Exhaustion is obvious - maintaining separate channels for different people is taxing. As for disheartening, well, that will require a bit of background.
Cracks in Social Life
As I aged I noticed that my social spheres are fragmented, and not just the work vs personal. I noticed that I had Dungeons and Dragon friends, boardgaming friends, video game friends, writing friends and twitch friends - with next to no overlap.
Can I really call any of them friend? If I invited them to a party would they show up? If they did, would they get along?
If indeed they were my friend, wouldn't they want to meet my other friends, even if they don't have a shared hobby?
So I am not Making a Separate Discord
As part of revamping my social presences, Discord has been something I thought about - after all, people go on it and stuff. Voice chat is a thing. There is also separate channels within a server that can be dedicated to a specific topic or series.
That is what I will be doing. If you enjoy some of my work, I'm sure you will get along with others who also enjoy it, even if its not the same series.
For Youtube I will maintain a channel for Twitch and a channel for my writing, mostly to not confuse the YT algorithm. There may be cross-posting between the two if there is overlap.
For those interested: https://discord.gg/2er2ss6pTg
Its ok if you're not interested. Discord as a program does have a learning curve and I get not everyone who isn't already on it will have the patience to undertake that. I'll be cross-posting other channels on there as well. I also do gaming community nights every so often for those of you that would be into that.
Link to Twitch: www.twitch.com/mikodite_yvette
I have had time to process this, and I want to say that it's more important to make yourself happy. Don't try to please anyone, thats like calculating infinity. You are the creator, follow your heart and your mind will follow. If anyone has ever said or wrote something that's critical of your work or you, I'm sorry. Don't believe them.
I think you have friends. It's how we communicate now. Instead of driving somewhere, we try to find people who are like-minded and that you can agree with on different subjects.So I talk to my daughter on Discord, and it's easy and sometimes helpful. Since she has been in Germany, her phone doesn't do what it used to. In fact, she is probably talking to me on her computer. It works. I received an email from space whale dreams an invitation, and it seems like it's for a community. I'm Shy a little and did not want to say something silly. I was not sure how to respond. Anyways, I follow what you are doing. If you have apple T…