Hi folks,
So, it’s getting to the end of June and if you’re here you’ve noticed that I haven’t been able to restart publication as planned. And unfortunately I’m here to announce that I’m not going to be able to in the near future. The reason for this is good news for the rest of my life, but unfortunately that leads to not great news for this project.
Anta Baku was something I really needed when I started it, and for the time I’ve been working on it it was very satisfying. Getting to weekly publication for significant periods still feels like a significant accomplishment to me, and I’ve had some difficulty recognizing that it isn’t a goal I really want going forward, at least not at the moment. I still really like the stories I have in my head, and I still have a desire to get them down and show them to the world, but the actual practice of that kind of got in its own way.
The thing is, putting my head down and working twenty hours a week on fiction in a room by myself was a very healing thing to me, and finishing a couple of books was a very healing thing for me, but one of the things that healing meant is that I no longer needed it as much. In February of this year I became fully rested for the first time in my adult life, and one of the things that meant is that I’m looking for projects that are less sitting in a chair by myself and more out working with others. I don’t know if that will be a lasting change, but so far it has been, even through some pretty annoying difficulties. And as long as that’s the mode I’m in, there’s just no way that working here enough to get to regular publication is practical.
I still want to finish Hera of Lexington, and being just a chapter and a half from the end of that is pretty frustrating, so I’m going to be looking to find some time for that. I’m still really interested in writing more in the CPTE universe. I’m still enthusiastic about things I had planned for the future here. But what I definitely can’t manage on a practical level is the pace that was the original goal. Maybe at some point my life will change around again and I will want to be more of a hermit for a time and it will make sense to try again. But right now it just doesn’t.
I don’t really have a coherent strategy for my writing at this point, and I’m coming to an acceptance that I don’t necessarily even want one right now. If I do finish those last two Hera chapters (and they nag at me) they’ll show up here. That’s only fair. But right now I don’t have an idea of how things might go forward beyond that. And that sounds kind of depressing but it isn’t; it’s because I have a lot of other stuff going on that I’m excited about and that just doesn’t fit in very well with continuing to produce fiction at a high rate.
So I guess this boils down to an indefinite hiatus? Maybe there will be more, but I don’t feel like I can promise it. We’ll just have to see what the future brings.
AB+