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Dear Vocal

Thank you for your challenge regarding 2024 aspirations (reference #200). I believe, by now, that I have built a reputation for honesty in this community, and I will attempt to be honest in my response.

Honest in my response? In that tone? No no no, that’s the tone I use to tell human resources they’ve screwed up my tax code, or complain to a service provider that I paid for something they didn’t provide. Honest, I suppose, but authentic? We can use language to mask and unmask equally effectively don’t you think?

I would say that in this monologue, I want you to see my face, but you know what I am not going to do? I’m not going to stick a frank, unimpeded, passport worthy picture of it atop these words. See me, please, but don’t see me. It’s a game a lot of us play. See me shine, my pain finessed, my humanity curated, but please don’t recognise me in the supermarket stumbling over my choice of sanitary wear. We are, after all, transcendent every time we write. Is this always helpful? The process of construal and construction are barely discernible when we wield language to tell our tales.

Stories are powerful. I state this as fact, not opinion, because there are few things I believe more unwaveringly. And I believe I may have been telling myself unhelpful ones about Vocal, which in turn have been sculpted from the excess clay of other stories in my life. Let me tell you about it.

It’s Monday afternoon. I don’t work on Mondays, though often I do, catching up on paper work, preparing for things so that I don’t let anyone down. Today, I am not undertaking paid work. Actually, today, I made some plans for myself. Genuinely, for myself. Nice plans, soothing plans. Plans that did not involving hunting down trousers for my son, or food shopping, or floor mopping, or changing beds or laboriously planning a family trip. Yes, soothing plans. Which is why I am here. 45 minutes before I need to pick the children up for school. Frantically soothing myself after doing all those other things.

Vocal is for me. And let’s be honest, the vast majority of us are here for ourselves. This is my “me time”, my hobby, my indulgence in a world of demands. And it has been great. I’ve been on Vocal for over 18 months now, and I have, in that time, written more than I had written in the preceding 18 years. I’ve enjoyed it, almost all of it, and I think I am getting better. (As an aside here, I just observed myself place a question mark at the end of that sentence. I have removed it.) But I have still failed to put myself at the centre of my me time.

It’s tempting, isn’t it, to think we can have it all. I know, I know, you can’t have it all. I mean, you’re only human. One person. It would be unrealistic to expect yourself to excel in every arena, to thrive in every facet of life. But me? Well, I’m special, aren’t I? I really SHOULD be able to just push a little harder, work a little smarter, be more, to more people, more of the time. No?

When we all received our Vocal Reverbs recently, I was… unaroused. Vocal is a business, we all know this, we paid in, bought a product, and on the whole, I’m not displeased with it. Today, I am wearing pleasing underpants. They are comfortable, wash well, and don’t pinch anywhere. On the other hand, there is a slight VPL under fitted clothes, and I’m seducing no one who wasn’t already all in in these smalls. This, for reasons which I cannot fathom, was the analogy that came to mind when contemplating my relationship with the Vocal platform. I like it. It works for me. Occasionally I wish I could turn a few more heads. But it is a business, and as a business, it is in the business of keeping me hooked and paying up. This is achieved in two ways. Firstly, there is the dangling of a steady stream of carrots. Long ones, short ones, orange ones and white ones and curiosity jingling purple ones, Vocal lays a trail like the child catcher waving candy. In fact, we’re so hungry for them, we started to grow our own.

Which brings me to the second lure. You. Vocal lit the camp fire and provided toasting forks, and we straggled in with the goods, sat down and passed victuals and stories between us, forging the relationships which keep us coming back to the fire. It’s not a bad business model. Do I mind that I am being baited and hooked? Seduced to stay? Would I mind being seduced by Poldark (BBC 2015 adaptation, season one, before it was fully evident he was a twat)? I want it, I tell you.

But around any campfire, between the laughter at a tale well told, the cheers of encouragement for a yarn of pluck and conquest and the wide-eyed, barely perceivable drawing together of a scary story, between every huddle of souls sharing cup, there is a lone newcomer, cold in the gloom beyond the circle, there is a quiet voice unheard in the melee, there is someone who does not know the way to the fire, or whether they have the right to sit by it. That was me. That was a lot of us. I came onto this platform without really understanding how it functions, and I churned out stories and nobody read them, and I was discouraged. I could see the fire was there, but there was no discernible route through the undergrowth.

And then someone got up from their nice warm spot to search for stragglers. She brought me in and said my name out loud, and others shook me by the hand and offered me nourishment, and now, here I sit, catching enough warmth to keep me near the fire, hailing familiar faces as they pass, sharing some heady concoction with weirdly addictive qualities with companions I am glad to have met.

Now, when this first happened, I remembered that there were other stragglers out there, and the service given to me by another, and I forayed daily for them. It was a quick journey out past the bushes after all. Gradually, though, I met more and more people around the fire. People who like to tell a tale so much they talk over one another frequently. Today, I sit on my spot, and before I can get up, I listen to five or six stories. When there is a pause, I move off towards the periphery, but I don’t get far without meeting a familiar face, and another, and another, all with tales to tell. Most days, now, I go to bed without ever hearing a new voice. Or my own.

And this is the story I have been telling myself. I was gifted a spot where the light reaches me. Not front row, sure, but I get a little warmth. But there is a levy to pay to keep it, I don’t sit here on my own merit. I owe rent. And I think I’ve been robbing the poor to pay the rich.

Vocal’s reverb gave me some information. How many stories I had written, how many words that amounted to. We like numbers, don’t we? Ooh those juicy quantifiables. The tangible toeholds of constant striving. It told me what my most popular story was, too. More on that later. It told me what I had done for myself on Vocal. We are, after all, mostly here for ourselves. But are these the most interesting metrics? How many stories did I READ this year? It’s a lot. In those early months I subscribed to many people, and I understood the contract to be that if I subscribe to you, I read you. I saw someone saying they read around 15 stories a week. I can read 15 stories before breakfast if I wake up to 15 notifications. I have a regular slot on the leaderboard for leaving most comments in a week. This is not by design. This is because I told myself that I must not let anyone down. But I cannot have it all, and I fear I have been letting the wrong people down.

So to the first of my aspirations for this year. I’m going to read less on Vocal. Not only am I going to read less, but I am going to reprioritise my reading so that I value it more. I want to sit around a fire of reciprocity. I want to hear your story, but I want space to tell mine too. There are evenings I sit down to write, and by the time I have finished reading, I have no time left to do it. And if you want to talk but never listen, I’m going to move along, no hard feelings, we can’t please all of the people. This, I hope, will allow me something else important – to make it into the outer reaches again. Armed now (thank you to whoever it was that shared it) with an AI detector, I’m going to spend more time on the periphery, listening to fresh accents. And, this I pledge to my family, I am going to spend less time at the fire, and more in the tent. I hope I am going to spend more time in privacy too, reading the books stacking high and dusty on my bedside table.

In terms of my own writing, my most “popular” story, which placed second in a challenge, has been read 212 times. 35 people like it. 17%. A lot of contact, not a lot of love. Little Witch and Nesting have an 85% love rating. Cabin Pressure, 88%, Corrupted Youth at 90%, Hypsacremia 95%, The Introvert, Ascending and a Drop in The Ocean, 100%. By some witchcraft of faulty accounting, The Writing Circle is on 108%, Getting Serious 111%, Border Force 133%, Marrakesh 145% , Communal Effort 150%, and Just right 166%! And how many of those were winners? (Zero, the answer is zero, pending tomorrow's results). But let’s not hang our hats on these statistics either. My contents page is at 88%. What these statistics show me is this – write what the fuck you want, you’re not in charge of what people warm to. Art is subjective, and writing is art. And I want to keep writing. I want to keep writing when time allows, and not neglecting the things that matter more when it doesn’t (it is now Wednesday by the way, and I have sat down to finish what I started). I want to keep trying my hand, I want to keep writing in that hinterland between “I can” and “can I?” which the Vocal challenges, official and community, have been so magnificent at providing access too. I’m hungry to try it all. New challenges, new communities, new collaborations, new critique. I have noticed, in my life in general, that I shy away from any form of leadership, and perhaps here on Vocal is where I might try leading my own challenge. I thought of one, some months ago, and since then I am aware another has had the same idea. Perhaps I will reach out.

My goals for my writing this year are hard to quantify. My aim is not a higher word count or a higher story count, it’s not a daily habit or a biweekly offering. But I would like to get better. Most of us here have had the fantasy of writing a novel, and I am no different in this. I am going to own the fact that I think I write goodly enough. My sentences is largely nice. Always room to get betterer and I want to go on betterating. But if my sentences are generally acceptable, my story telling is weaker. I get away with it in short stories, most of them form organically as I go, but this year, I want to give some time over to developing my story telling so that it can sustain longer forms. This may involve seeking some outside guidance. A book, or a workshop perhaps. An investment I have never before made in my writing, giving time to learning, even if that means writing less overall. I cannot, you see, do it all.

Mostly, I want to write for me. Shortly before New Year, I reached the milestone of 2000 total reads, and I am pleased with it. It pales next to some of the figures I have seen flying about. I tell myself more stories about that – Well, I don’t spend time on Facebook, I haven’t learnt to use Discord – and steer myself away from the tale of the terrible writer and straight into the arms of the chronical of the chronically unpopular. How do we even measure merit here? Vocal has never been a meritocracy, and I need to stop expecting it to be. By not expecting it to be, I give myself the privilege of defining what I view to be meritorious. Who I want to be here. I get to take my story in a new direction, to construct this experience more mindfully. This is where it starts, but I already have my ending.

I want, at the end of 2024, someone else to be able to tell this story about me, the one I would like to tell about myself:

“She really helped me and actually it's been great to be able to support each other. She’s very good, you know, she can turn her hand to anything. I would like to think we would be friends in real life too.”

And that last bit? We may never know, but let's tell it that way, all the same.