Refreshstration

Marlene knew deep in her heart: she was prepared to be a writer. She'd taken all of the classes on creative writing, attended a workshop on writing memoirs, had even built her own blog, for goodness sake!

She'd downloaded Grammarly and bookmarked thesauruses online. Used Spellcheck. Read the articles about AI and knew how to credit them in her work, while secretly scared to death to even contemplate doing so.

Marlene had flirted with Substack, slept with Medium, danced with Newsbreak, and in the end made it Facebook-official that she had married Vocal when she shared her first story with her social network.

She had known she was ready, but was stunned that all of that prep hadn't prepared her as much as had trying to purchase concert tickets on the Live Nation website.

The emotion was exactly the same: careful input of information (personal info to purchase the ticket vs. entering the text of the story), visual choices (Unsplash or Pixabay as the lead image vs. choosing just the right seat for the concert), and then the wait after submitting.

With the ticket purchase the struggle was to overcome the temptation to refresh the page just to get rid of the horrid spinning swirl as the moments ticked on.

With Vocal? It was giving in to the wild urges every second, constantly refreshing the page to see if the story had posted.

Refreshtration is real: damned if you do , damned if you don't.

~

Comments welcomed!