I hear you, Michael. With my writing I also have perfectionist tendencies that often block me. But for whatever reason I don’t have any sort of perfectionist block with my comics. Maybe it’s because I did comics as a child and I still have that child-like attitude of doing them for fun without caring too much about what others think. I just put them out without worrying much at all and they often do better than stories I wrote and fretted about endlessly.

So my experience with putting out comics has helped me to be less judgemental of my writing too.

Maybe there’s something you could publish that you feel less perfectionist about? Comics, drawings, photos, poetry, tutorials, book summaries, product reviews, whatever.

Also, if you publish enough, you eventually learn that there really isn’t any correlation between the effort you put into a story and how well it does. I’ve had some stories I only spent a few hours on do well and others I worked on for weeks flop spectacularly.

Moreover, when I started writing publicly and had only published a handful of stories, everything always seemed to hinge on the story I was writing at that moment. But once you’ve published over 100 stories, you just can’t help and care less about each individual story. I think that has also helped with my perfectionist tendencies.

My tip: just start and don’t make it your goal to publish a handful of perfect stories, but to publish over 100 okay stories.

And as you said in the other comment, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. Just don’t forget that yourself. ;)