On Giving Up on Fiction Writing
Filed Under: My Writing, personal
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.
Postmortem:”Babe, I Am Going to Leave You”
Filed Under: My Writing, Speculative Fiction, Writing Process
Yesterday, I released my intensely personal story of death, Led Zeppelin, and how families cope with death, “Babe, I am Going to Leave You” as a CC-licensed story. A friend asked what my thinking was behind doing this, so I thought I’d break it down in a blog post, in case anyone else was interested.I wrote this story, over the course of about a year, in an attempt to come to terms with my own father’s death from cancer. I always intended to try and publish it somewhere like any other story I wrote, but once I tried doing so, I found I had invested too much of myself to be able to handle the rejections. Most rejections are slightly painful, but you can shrug them off. I just couldn’t shrug off rejections to this story.
I struggled with whether I should essentially “self-publish” the story. I don’t have a large readership here. I’m not John Scalzi or Jay Lake, although I hope to attract as many followers some day. Am I the only writer who wonders about maximizing the audience for their stories, or do we all worry about that? I don’t make much money from my stories, so I’ve focused on growing an audience more than the money.
I also worried that some would see releasing the story myself as a coward’s way out. I do feel guilty for not trying harder to find a place to publish the story that could have given it more readers than I could on my own. The story is, in a big way, my way of honoring my father. Did I do him honor just releasing it to the handful of people who read this? I don’t know. I was tired of having it here, and having no one read it though. I really wanted to do good with this story. I had experienced something profound and painful, and I wanted to help others get through a similar experience. The chance to do some good, even a little, is what convinced me it was the right thing to do.
I want to thank those of you who linked my story in your own blogs. I really appreciated that. It made me feel much more like I made a good choice here. And those of you who have written me, thanking me for posting the story. I am glad that it has helped you.
In the future, I will definitely continue to release reprints of my stories online under the Creative Commons. It can only help a writer at my stage of career. I don’t think I will release any other unpublished stories though, because I think it’s too easy and attractive to circumvent the rejection/acceptance process.
For example, I have this story about a plague that turns famous people into plastic statues and about the people who collect the formerly famous like baseball cards. It’s got a very political slant, and never found a home probably because of that, or maybe because it’s not as funny as I think it is. There’s a strong temptation to just publish it on the web, especially because it’s partially about Bush and he’s about to leave the White House (I hope) and the story will lose its relevancy at that point. I don’t know. Maybe I can find a publisher for it int he next 9 months. Or I can sell it as alt-history futurism later.
Still, regardless, I am glad I released this one story this way. Thank you for reading it.
A CC-Licensed Story: “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You”
Filed Under: My Writing, Speculative Fiction, Top Post
A CC-Licensed Story: “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You”
I slept very badly last night, and had a migraine to end all migraines. I’m slowly recovering this morning. I recently woke up and, along with this lingering headache, I found I have an overwhelming desire to give something away.
I’ve posted a story online under a Creative Commons license. It’s about death, Led Zeppelin, and how families cope. A lot of it really happened. Some of it did not. It’s so intensely personal that I can’t bear to receive another rejection calling it “slight” or anything else, so here it is, posted for anyone to read and call “slight” or anything else they want to call it. What is important to me is that maybe someone reads it who is going through something similar and feels a little less alone. Writing it sure helped me. But your milage may vary.
With that said, here’s the link to the story. Share it as you see fit.
Babe, I’m Going to Leave You
Whale Fall
Filed Under: My Writing, Science, Top Post
When a whale dies, an entire ecosystem blossoms in its corpse. Species of clams, worms, and other invertebrates can be found on the bones of a dead whale that cannot be found anywhere else. The “seeds” of these ecosystems seem to lay dormant in the benthos of the deep oceans, waiting for that one-in-a-million chance that a whale, it’s last breath escaping for the surface, will fall to the muck and mud. Imagine being stranded in the desert, your only hope for flourishing in the form of a giant falling from the sky. Tons and tons of meat and bone, providing nourishment and succor. Later, sulfur-loving bacteria pick over the bones and release hydrogen sulfide, launching an entirely new ecosystem of chemosynthetic bacteria. And it’s here where the diversity really gets wild, with nearly 200 different species making up the community, feeding on the bacteria, feeding on the feeders of the bacteria.
I see no beauty in death. I am terrified of it, as a general rule. The loss of a human mind to the black maw of nothing is the only thing that frightens me, really. My panic attacks, at their root, are all about my fear of death. But, for some reason, I read about whale falls, and I am filled with awe and amazement. There is beauty there, for me, and I don’t know why. A great, amazing creature dies, and gives life to not just one, but several ecosystems, for years and years after its death.
I want my death, when it comes, if it comes (as I hope to catch the wave of life extension science and live for centuries–a foolish hope, but I cannot relinquish it), to be as beautiful and as generative as a whale fall. I want what I have done in my life to create as much, perhaps. And the fear of death that I have–maybe it’s because I know I haven’t done that yet. Now would be too soon. I’m not ready. That’s what the attacks are about. Not being ready.
I refuse to come to terms with the idea of my own mortality. Not yet. Not until I can die like the whales do.
