It Is Finished

Behold a tale of a blog in three posts: the first written in exuberance and pride, the second two months later admitting an ocean of terror and doubt. And then a long lull. The longest lull, in fact, the blog's author has ever produced (and we're talking about a guy who had some long lulls in his blog post history).

Followed, years later, by a post with this ominous title. ​

No, I haven't died and I'm not dying. But sometimes something happens in a person's life that turns everything upside down, that forces them to re-evaluate all their values and positions against a particular core bedrock value. Say, for example, "Honesty in Writing" vs "The Need for Family Privacy." Or even more brutally, "Politics and Worldview" vs "Love for Family." 

If being a skeptic means anything to me, it means that my views must always serve truth. If I'm not serving truth, if I'm in denial, if I'm excluding certain facts because they are inconvenient or difficult to consider, then I am completely lost. It is not an exaggeration to say I traded God for Truth; Truth holds the same vaunted position in my values hierarchy that God once did.

I and my family have gone through some things in the past few years that have forced a complete, top-to-bottom reckoning with my value system. And my involvement in those events, as devastating as it has been for me, has been ultimately tangential. I can't the tell the story of what I've been through without telling someone else's story first. And that story is not mine to tell. 

I struggled for four years to figure out what was going on. Why I couldn't write. Where all the stories went. Why I had 10,000 words down in three different novels that were all withering on the vine. But writing fiction, for me, is rooted in truth, just like every other element of my worldview. It's rooted in honesty and baring my soul.  When I change my mind about things, particularly critical bedrock things like politics or religion, I want to talk about it. I want to analyze it. And you can read the paragraph before this again to identify the problem quite easily. I'll give you a clue. It's in the words, "I can't tell the story."

I'm a deeply creative person. Creation is my default response to life stimuli. I still have writing ideas all day long; I still long to finish and share every story I've begun. But writing is not the only form of creation I love, and I've finally come to accept that. 

So I've started something new. 

Now, I don't expect that I have a whole ton of followers left, and of those I do, I expect the Venn diagram of people who will be interested in anything at that URL with the people who visited this URL to display a slim overlap indeed. I don't share it because of marketing or trying to get you to follow me to the next thing.

I share it because if you're reading this, you mean the world to me. You've read my books. You may have even paid to read my books, or told others about my books, or left a review, or signed up on my mailing list to hear more about what I'm working on. You're invested, or you once were, in what I create. And in my mind, that creates a debt on my part. Not a debt to finish what I started - life is capricious and cruel, and no one can swear to finish everything they start. But at the minimum, a debt to be honest with you to the degree I can. To let you know, officially, that for the foreseeable future, I am done writing fiction. 

Of course I hold a slim hope that I'll finish the Redemption Chronicle one day - maybe when I'm old and retired and can let go of all the doubts about its artistic value being tied to it financial value. Of course I want to publish the sci-fi series I started working on, because I am intensely proud of that and would love to share it. But I am done pretending that either of those things are on any horizon that I can see from here.

So, one last time, I want to thank you for coming on this journey with me. Having readers was an incredible joy, one I will treasure forever. I hope I brought you even half as much of the thrill you brought me.