TheLonerLion
Heyyy Lion! What an inspiring piece, thumbs up! <33

Since people are sharing their life tidbits I guess I'll share mine haha. When I was in grade one, I was put into a private ESL (English as Second Language) program because I was a pretty sickly child and basically missed 3 weeks out of a month of school in junior and senior kindergarten. My parents only spoke Chinese at home even though we lived in Canada, so as you could imagine, I wasn't doing that well in language class.

Thanks to my teacher's hard work though, I quickly caught up to my classmates because I absolutely loved reading stories. And honestly, the ESL classes took place during my gym classes (and I am a very clumsy and unathletic person) so I was pretty happy to skip gym to read LOL.

When I was eleven, an older friend showed me Fanfiction.net and I fell in love. I made them make me an account and started writing really, reeeeally terrible fanfics....they're still on my account today and my eyes bleed a bit whenever I see them. I took a break from writing after a year and signed up for deviantart instead to draw, and only came back when I was fourteen. But I was going into high school soon, so I decided to up my writing skills and wrote maybe 300k words in the summer before high school started. My writing still wasn't that great, but there was a vaaaast improvement after typing out 300k words.

I kept pumping out fanfics after that through my high school career (was in a specialized music program for strings where we sometimes had over 5 hours of orchestra rehearsal practice a day, and I had to practice 2-5 hours of solo playing at home, plus I took all maths and science courses) though my speed slowed a bit. All my readers back then had been super, super encouraging even though sometimes I could only post one chapter a month! Honestly, if I didn't have those kind readers, I think I would have given up writing fiction long, long ago.

When I turned eighteen, I found NovelUpdates.com and fell in love with translated novels. My fanfic updating had slowed down to almost non-existence because of university applications and other reasons, so mindlessly reading cnovels was great haha. Through some mishaps I ended up hurtling myself into the translator world, and then my writing skills dropped like 10x because of Chinese grammar...

I found out about Webnovel when it came out and didn't sign up because of exams, but after my break started I was raring to write again after translating for a whole year! As of now, I have four translation projects, 1.5 original novels (co-writing a new one with a friend, wink wonk) and a few dozen fanfictions. I'm also in university as well, but since I'm on break I'll skip that to shorten my looong post here LOLOL. Anyway, I found a bunch of my old fanfiction readers during my translating and also after I began posting on webnovel, so it's been a long journey!

Adding on to what others have been saying, every single reader is precious to us! But it's also amazing to see readers comment and tell us their thoughts, because as a writer, after working on a chapter for x amount of hours the worst thing would be feeling like you threw it into the void after posting it. I know many readers don't really comment because of time restraints or because you think we don't care, but we do and you totally make our day!

And lol mandatory small plug for my current original novel. Hope you don't mind, Lion!
https://www.webnovel.com/book/10839800106186105/REWOUND