Proof of Life Update

Facing Burnout while tackling the career I've always wanted

Hello friends. It's been a while. I know I haven't posted a blog since October when The Shadow Sisters came out. And well, there's reason enough for that. I'd love to tell you that I've been busy toiling away at a new story or two. And while I do have somewhere around six current works in progress, I'm not anywhere close to having something ready to release. And I'm coming to realize that that's okay. The most important thing that I'm working on right now is me. And frankly, that's the work in progress that needs the most attention.

This past March I came to a decision. My full time job was draining me beyond my ability to recover. I was constantly exhausted and getting nowhere with my writing. Even though I had just released a new book less than six months ago, I wasn't doing the things I had done in the past to promote it. I wasn't searching out podcasts to get on. I wasn't writing to book reviewers. I was just putting out graphics on social media and calling it a day. It was all I had the energy for. And frankly, the sales results reflected the level of effort I had to give. And if any of you have ever put yourself out there, either in print, on stage, or in any other creative way, you know that the only thing worse than bad feedback is no feedback at all.

So yeah, I got depressed. Again. It's a vicious cycle with me. Every so often I feel like I'm coming out of the dark only to have it swallow me fucking whole once more. And that's where I've been these last few months. Trapped in the depressive hell that is burnout recovery. To say that I'm in the midst of "recovering" is optimistic at this point. I'm still having an extremely hard time. My sleep schedule is a mess. My mental health, likewise. But I've made some changes that should be helping. And they are... a little at a time.

As of early April, I am no longer employed. This was my choice, with the emotional backing of my wife. In fact, she more or less demanded that I take some time off for my own good. She had been recommending it for a while. But as usual, we tend to only listen to the people around us when life itself demands we pay attention. And that's what happened in March.

I was in a car accident. I was on the way to my day job when the car in front of me stopped short after the car in front of them stopped short, and well, I chose the ditch. And while my car momentarily learned how to fly, it was the landing that did it in.

Let's state the most important part definitively: I'm physically fine. The car's safety features did their job remarkably, and I walked away relatively unscathed. However, my daily half hour commute was no longer feasible, and I finally listened to my wife and decided that enough was enough. I gave my notice and have been out of work since my two weeks expired. I haven't been looking either. I decided instead to take the time to recover mentally from the years of burnout that has been slowly building up in the background.

So, I guess technically, being an author is my full time job now. That being said, you'd think I'd be writing more. But alas, burnout is a killer. It takes the joy from just about everything. And it took two months for me to write anything but just sporadically. It was June before I so much as set a goal. And while I missed that goal spectacularly, I did write a little over 8,000 words. That's not exactly chump change, but a few years ago that was what I would put out in a week while working a fulltime job.

So what changed? Why is it so much harder to write than it used to be when this is truly my passion? Why does it feel so impossible these days?

Well, for one, I've spent a lot of time lamenting the poor sales of The Shadow Sisters. I love that book, and I really do feel like it deserves to be read. But it's a dark fantasy, and the world is plenty dark right now. So yeah, maybe it's not the story that people want. And I certainly didn't do the book any favors by being completely burnt out when it released.

But I also know that I need to put that aside -- like I was able to for every other book before it -- and focus on the next project. And I'm making some headway on that, albeit slowly.

The problem with burnout is that it doesn't just go away. It's a process. And when you're burnt out, you have no patience for the process. You have no patience for anything. You're just constantly exhausted. One would think that ten hours or more of sleep every night would fix this, but apparently I still have years of sleep to catch up on. For instance, I went to bed at midnight last night and still didn't get up until ten-thirty. And as I sit here typing this at one-thirty in the afternoon, I'm still exhausted.

Make it make sense.

And in case it's not obvious, you can't write a book when you're constantly sleeping. I know. I've tried.

I've tried adding structure to my day. I have an alarm that goes off at eight am every morning. But since I don't need to be anywhere, I just turn it off and roll back over. I have a planner with a list of projects I know I want to work on. My lovely and wonderful wife has tried making me a schedule. Instead I just go with the flow. And I wonder if I'm trying to force things when I sit down to write, but I can usually put out anywhere from 500-2000 words when I actually put my ass in the chair and my laptop in my lap. The problem is getting started. Because if I could actually find the energy to write four to five days a week, I would have blown my June goal out of the water rather than barely passing the half-way point.

So it comes back, once again, to the burnout. It takes a long time to put aside the years of abuse our system puts us through. Here in the United States, the average vacation time allotment we get per year is two weeks. It's been three months and I'm still constantly exhausted! We can't retire until we're sixty-five, if we are lucky, 67, 72, 75... assuming we can afford to retire at all. There's very little social safety net, so believe me when I say that I understand the privledge I have in being able to take this time to recover. I just wish I was producing more while I had this oppurtunity.

And that's the crux of the problem, isn't it. Even when we're burnt out, we are expected to produce. There is no true break. Even now, during a time when I'm supposed to be recovering, all I can thing about is that I should be doing MORE. The fact that so few of us can actually do what we love in order to survive, that we turn our passions into side hussles. The next thing you know, you can't find the passion consistently anymore. The burnout is baked into the cake.

So how do we partake in an unhealty system in a way that doesn't kill us inside?

No seriously, I'm asking. Because I don't know anymore. I want to love the things I love. I want to feel like I can love them without monetizing them to the point where if I have a bad book release, it doesn't feel like my whole world is crumbling. And I'm working on it. The results are still mixed, and I'm learning to accept that that's okay, even if it's not ideal.