I'm so glad you're collecting stories about this! What a positive response to it.

If I win, I'd love to donate my shares to @tristancarax, who is one of the people who is not only working hard to bring value to the blockchain with his write, AND not only counteract the negative impact of @mmmmkkkk311, BUT ALSO is homeless and would do better with more income from Steem, not less, but who this downvoter doesn't care that he's hurting.

Anyways, my story is about how @freewritehouse and @steembasicincome have kept me writing.

By 2016, I was exhausted. I had written a script for months and had then found people interested in bringing it to life. Then, as is common in Hollywood, nothing happened. I spent years trying to make something happen, and always feeling very close to something happening, but in the end, nothing happened. It was exhausting and disheartening.

When I joined Steem in 2017, I wasn't feeling particularly like writing. I shared portions of the script I'd written on the blockchain, wanting it to still bring people joy even if it could never get made. Like on any platform, building engagement is hard no matter the quality of your content, and it only got a few readers, who, incidentally, were very kind fans. I also liked the idea of establishing my ownership on the blockchain of my script. It's not NECESSARY, there are plenty of witnesses to my ownership of that script, but at least the blockchain will never disappear, or so goes the fable, and so a thousand years from now, they will know what I had created.

Shortly thereafter, I began writing freewrites. I wasn't sure it was something I would become dedicated to, and heck, I was putting a little bit of time into all the crypto things I was just discovering then. There were dozens of them, and nothing stood out... until @mariannewest wrote to me and asked if we could build what became @freewritehouse. Suddenly a community of people who not only wrote, but also read surrounded me. I was inspired... and dedicated. Before @mmmmkkkk311's disheartening downvotes came, I didn't miss a single freewrite. (Now, he's not entirely to blame. Lots of things, including depression probably stemming from the death of my dad, stripped me of the energy and will to continue.) I was motivated not only by the community of @freewritehouse, but also by the promise of one day having a reliable income stream that I could help others build as well.

And that's where SBI comes in. The vast majority of freewriters and SBI users are regular folks. We never used bidbots. We didn't engage in vote-trading schemes with whales. We invested the time and money that we could into making this platform our home. That meant reliability. Freewritehouse provides that with daily prompts. I try to provide that with my weekly Punday Monday, and SBI provides that by making the giving of prizes a sustainable function.

To tomorrow. May it be better than yesterday.