What Whitney Wants to Say #12

To be completely honest, I am shocked by the growth of this newsletter. When I first made the transition to Substack, I had no expectations at all. I just wanted to start writing again. Mainly, I wanted my lifeline back. However, since July I’ve received so much support and love that it’s just completely blown me away. You all are so kind and it’s really made me feel like I made the right decision in making the move. I can’t wait to see what next year brings!

• The art for today’s What Whitney Wants to Say and every edition hereafter was created by my wonderful younger sister! She is so incredibly talented and I’m blessed to have such an artist in my life. If you’re interested in checking out her art, her instagram name is @Chialga. Thanks sis!

• NaNoWriMo was a success… in a way. I ended up dropping my writing goal way down to 10,000 words which is admittedly way under the intended goal but I made it anyway. I’m trying not to get down about it but I really need to find a way to pick up the pace. I long for the days of hard deadlines and papers worth 40% of your grade because in school I could write 5,000 words in a weekend and now I can do… definitely not that.

• I’ve been following the Goodreads, debut author fiasco pretty closely and I’m glad that steps are being made to right the wrongs that were committed. If you have not heard about it yet, there was a group chat of sorts that served as a place for a few debut authors (many of which are signed to the same agent) to talk and connect. Unbeknownst to the group, one of the authors had been posing as various people of color despite not being one herself and review bombing the books of the writers of color in the group, while giving herself 5 star reviews. This is especially ridiculous considering her book is a fantasy book featuring characters of color. There has since been a fallout, accompanied with a lot of twitter back and forth that I won’t get into now but there are a few things that should be said on this matter. Mostly, Community isn't competition. Writing and being a writer can be a really isolating. It’s hard to meet others who can relate so when you find yourself in a community of writers, it makes sense to foster that community and become a supportive member of it. At least it makes sense to me but to hear that someone betrayed their community in such a way is just really disappointing. She also lost the book deal she worked so hard to get. Literally destroyed her own career trying to bolster it, when she could’ve let her work stand on its own. Just nonsense all around. Very boo boo the fool behavior.

• Several businesses have cut ties with Diddy and his affiliated companies in light of the allegations against him and I genuinely hope this is the start of the end for his career and influence. Diddy has been a looming pop culture figure for decades and even as a child the allegations made against him were public enough for the stories to trickle so far down as my playground conversations. However, nothing ever materialized as far as accountability for him. Which is unfortunately the story for a lot of powerful figures, especially in the music industry. It isn’t lost on me that the music industry never really had the #metoo moment that we saw in acting and film. I have no doubt that if he were to face even a modicum of justice, the floodgates would open.