I Think It’s Time to Call It
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I’ve been banging my head against this wall for over two decades
I’ve been at this writing thing for a while now - most of my adult life, in fact. Ever since creating my first comic book with a friend of mine 25 years ago, it’s been my dream to make my living as a writer, though my dream to spend my days telling stories is life-long.
Here in the exciting future year of 2022, at the milestone age of 50, I look back on all that followed from that indie comic my friend and I self-published in 1997 and ask myself if it was worth it.
On the one hand, it definitely was. Since that initial project, I’ve written more comics (both print and web), short stories, novels, and a whole mess of other stuff (including two fictional essay publications I created for this site). I learned a lot about being a writer and telling stories. I flatter myself to think I eventually got pretty good at it, and I honestly enjoyed telling those stories.
What I didn’t enjoy was literally everything else. If you want to make a living as a storyteller in this day and age, you need to be good at it, yes, but you have to be even better at selling, both your work and yourself. Unfortunately, despite years of trying, reams of advice, some moderately expensive marketing classes, and far more time than I would have liked in the cesspool of social media, I am no closer to that dream than I was 25 years ago.
As opposed to all I learned about writing over this past quarter-century, the only thing I really learned about sales and marketing is how unrelentingly bad at it I am.
I have also spent the past 20 years or so as the sole provider for my household, which meant holding a full-time, often demanding job in the tech industry. Building a writing career while also holding a full-time job and raising a family is, frankly, a lot. For a while, I managed it, but these days I only have the energy for one full-time job and I kinda have to prioritize the one that keeps my family housed and fed.
(I realize I am not unique in trying to balance two careers and a family, and that many have done exactly that incredibly successfully. Bully for them. This is an essay about how much I suck at all this, not how great your cousin is at managing their time)
As I consider the progress (and lack thereof) that I’ve made towards my life-long dream, the time has come to accept that it’s just not going to happen. I know people say you can find success at any age, but this isn’t feeling like that kind of situation. Keeping at it feels more like a sunk-cost fallacy than anything else at this point.
So it’s time to say goodbye to the dream and let it die with some semblance of dignity.
Will I keep telling stories? Most likely. I’m just not sure how far I’ll take it. Writing a novel is a lot of work (if you want it to actually be any good), and as I said, my energy reserves aren’t what they were. Still, I currently have a novel in progress, so I might finish it just for completion’s sake. Will I publish it? Maybe. I enjoy a lot of that process too, so I might put the book out there for the fun of it.
That being said, I won’t market it or try to sell it in any way, and it will very likely be the last novel I write. I’ll probably keep my hand in with short stories or comics, but I’m done trying to keep this a going concern.
What I do with what’s already out there (including the stories on this site) is currently up in the air. I’m probably going to take down at least some of the books I have for sale, though I’ll probably keep the stories I have here (and a few novels) around for the hell of it.
Or I’ll scorched-earth the whole thing and never look back. It’s a decision in progress.
It’s weird saying goodbye to a dream, especially one I’ve had this long and put so much of myself into. But it’s only a dream, and something else I’ve learned over the years is just how much bigger the world can be than one dream, so I’m sure I’ll be fine.
We have much bigger problems, after all.
