Am I Doing Alright?

Am I Doing Alright?

Always with the existential questions, Moriarty...

Yeah, I'm doing pretty ok. So what happened then?

Burnout, that's all. A little more than a year ago, I had one of "Those" calls from work. The kind where I have to tell my family I'm headed out on the road and I don't know when I'll be back. In this case, it was a fortnight and done, but by the time we managed it I'd reached the point where I was ready to ask the hotel what kind of rate they'd give me if I booked a month at a time.

I was kind of burnt out on the day job after that one. Fortunately, I recognized it for what it was and so, by the time I got a similar phone call a couple months back, I was both prepared in wellness and mind and body, and able to pace myself a little better over the weeks I was on the road. These sorts of emergencies are part of the gig, I get it.

Which is why much of the past year, for me, has been spent looking at my daily and re-working my mind. I've been through it before, you see. I'm susceptible to it, I spend years at a time focused on technical, difficult questions of the kind that require that kind of focus and thought.

When it catches up to me, I tend to lose a year or so before I get my head on straight again. At least this time I didn't run off to join the circus.

Ok, and what's that got to do with writing, then?

Well, dear reader, I thought I could plow straight on through with the writing. More or less anyway, I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't put out any books over that time period, just the short stories I posted here. So I did know that I needed to address myself to myself on the writing front, as well.

I just put it off, you see. Until I couldn't.

Or, rather, not the writing. But my writing was the most obvious symptom. The act of it is still just as joyous.

When I can drag myself to the chair. And there I finally recognized the problem. I couldn't get to the chair to write, except under pain of posting here.

I couldn't get to a chair to play guitar, either. And then it hit my reading again. See, that's what happened the second time I burnt myself out completely.

I couldn't read fiction anymore. A book a day reader, and I couldn't finish a goddamned one of them. Up against the wall, you bastards... and if it's never happened to you, I can't even begin to tell you how broken that can make you feel.

I went for years like that, only able to read a couple fiction books a year, and those only from authors I knew and trusted that I could sit with and get lost for hours. New voices were too hard a lift for me.

I got better. But now I'm not just reading, I'm writing. So I have to figure out what makes it fun.

The start of it was realizing that publishing a story here once a week had run its course for me. I've always had a problem with practicing; I can't do it. Not the way "normal" folks do it, anyway.

I have to play games with myself. And once a game becomes work or a habit, I have to change what I do and quick.

Or I'll quit and lose all progress. The grey matter's a funky old place where it sits between my ears I admit.

For now, what that means is that I will be going back to a much more free form of posting for a while. I'll need to be able to tell myself that I don't have to do anything that I don't want to.

Note well, that doesn't at all mean that I don't have story projects I want to do. Oh, no, dear reader, you're not getting away from me that easy. Keep the faith, all. Be well. Take care of yourselves, please, and when the voices in your head start warning you of trouble pay attention.

And thank you for sticking around.