Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been talk­ing about this in pri­vate for a while now, but I’ve decided to talk about it pub­li­cally.  There’s a lot of infor­ma­tion out there about how to start writ­ing, but there’s not a lot writ­ten about how to stop.  Sorry if you’ve heard some of this before.

I’ve been strug­gling with writ­ing since my father’s death a few years ago.  His death was fol­lowed by his brother, then his mother, then both of my mother’s par­ents within a year.  Around the same time, my lit­tle sister’s health prob­lems became sig­nif­i­cant enough that she needed a kid­ney trans­plant.  Our fam­ily was put through the wringer, and I did not come out of it okay.

Early last year, my occa­sional panic attack prob­lem turned into a daily panic attack prob­lem.  Eating any­thing made me feel sick, and feel­ing sick felt like dying, and then I really lost it.  I tried to get help via my med­ical doc­tor, but they were afraid to pre­scribe a high enough dose of any­thing to help me.  I finally gave up and went to a psy­chi­a­trist who quadru­pled the med­ica­tion and finally started get­ting my attacks under con­trol.  The panic attacks had gone on for so long that I had lost over 50 pounds.  After get­ting med­ica­tion work­ing to con­trol the attacks,  I con­tin­ued to lose weight.  Recently, to my dis­may I’ve started to regain some, but that’s a topic for another post.

So it wasn’t until last year that men­tally I was start­ing to come back together.  Prior to my father’s ill­ness, I was pretty solid. I was enthu­si­as­tic and I was very pro­duc­tive as a writer.  I hated Laramie, but liv­ing there moti­vated me some­how to write 1–3 short sto­ries a week.  It was a won­der­ful out­let, and I learned a lot in my time there and started mak­ing my first few big sales.

So come the bad times of the last few years, my pro­duc­tion ground to a halt.  I had been work­ing on a novel loosely based on my father’s child­hood in Kansas in the 70s called Prince Starling when he called to tell me he had can­cer.  I think the coin­ci­dence here dam­aged me in some fun­da­men­tal way inside regard­ing writ­ing.  It broke some con­nec­tion I had to my cre­ative spirit.  The mon­key deep inside some­how decided, ridicu­lously, that by hav­ing used my father’s sto­ries that way, it was some how respon­si­ble for his illness.

I wrote some while he strug­gled with it.  I really didn’t believe he was dying until he was in hos­pice, because he did such a good job of pre­tend­ing he was going to beat it.  I will always react with sus­pi­cion to claims of recov­ery from can­cer now.  But I believed because I wanted to believe and I had to believe.

Now, in the last six months, I was laid off from a hor­ri­ble job and after a cou­ple of months of ter­ri­fy­ing free­lance scur­ry­ing, I got my best job yet with a new com­pany. I  work from home, I have tremen­dous cre­ative free­dom, and I get to work with cut­ting edge web tech­nolo­gies.   The only down­side is that it’s pretty time con­sum­ing and it leaves me more men­tally drained at the end of the day than I have ever been.

Rather than fight it, I’ve decided to just go with it.  The job is great, but it takes enough from me that I find writ­ing to be far too dif­fi­cult to man­age at this time.  Roundbottom takes up a con­sid­er­able chunk of my free time and I find it mostly very cre­atively ful­fill­ing.   I cer­tainly won’t run that site and project for the rest of my life, but I could get sev­eral years out of it for sure.

I love the idea of writ­ing.  I love writ­ing ideas.  But lately, the strug­gles to keep my life afloat have left me with lit­tle energy to deal with the fight of publishing.

Truth is, I am still pretty emo­tion­ally sen­si­tive.  I was much thicker-​​skinned before all this, but neg­a­tive reviews lit­er­ally send me into stu­pid tears.   Rejections some­times as well.   My one and only Clarkesworld rejec­tion con­firmed my worst fears about my inabil­i­ties and I nearly made the deci­sion there to give up on writ­ing per­ma­nently.    I do not have what it takes to shrug off rejec­tion very well.  Perhaps its because I have deep per­sonal issues iwth the sub­ject of rejec­tion or some­thing.  Either case, I can’t seem to make it not both­er­ing me, so when I’m doing it, it’s a major source of pain for me.

So to recap,  per­sonal issues, strug­gle with time and energy, plus inabil­ity to han­dle rejec­tion (all adding up to what is prob­a­bly a lack of motivation)–these are the rea­sons I have decided to set aside my pur­suit of a side-​​career as a fic­tion writer, at least until I have a bet­ter grip on the basics of a life, a fam­ily, and a job.

I hope those of you who are my writer and edi­tor friends won’t drift away because I’m not writ­ing.  I will be more than happy to read stuff for peo­ple.  I will not be giv­ing up read­ing, and talk­ing about SF.  Just putting any real story words out myself, except for the weekly Roundbottom sched­ule stuff which is not insignificant.

I don’t con­sider this a per­ma­nent retire­ment.  It’s still a pas­sion of mine, and I hope to return to it when I feel like it’s in me, maybe in a cou­ple of years.