Well, first of all, thank you for your concern (troll). I’m glad that you care enough about me and my writing to try and set me straight about a situation you know nothing about–it is just the greatest of kindnesses, I truly, truly appreciate it.
You’re right though, I do owe people more of an explanation for why I have been so lax on the whole “putting out seven caption stories a week plus working on my own personal stories plus working on commissions plus holding down a full time job plus running my own business plus maintaining a marriage and feeding and playing with three dogs plus trying to figure out what to do with my life” thing. But first, I want to go over a few things about your comment.
First thing: your comment here is functionally identical to the one I just criticized. You, the sender of the comment, are dissatisfied in some way with my posting on this blog. You, the sender, also have enough sense of entitlement to feel that I owe you products of your choosing–that by clicking and navigating about my blog here, carrying with you a certain set of expectations, I am duty bound to provide that content to you with no real tangible benefit on my end. Do you really feel like your eyeballs are that important to me? Do you really think that I write these stories so I can gain ‘respect’ or ‘acclaim’ or ‘good feelsies that people like my stories’?
That’s not actually a benefit. Unlike most of tumblr (and this is something I have been reluctant to admit to myself over the last year) I really have a very hard time caring about making that little ‘followers’ number go up and up, and the number of ‘likes/reblogs’ any given story gets means less to me than how I personally feel about these stories, and whether I feel they are advancing my writing to a greater level. The numbers, the metrics, the comments, while nice and appreciated, are supplementary. They are not the reason I chose to put my writing out here into the vast interwebs. Your personal opinion is of minimal import, yet your sense of entitlement blinds you to that very obvious fact. I do not care that people read my stories–and they will read them whether or not I care about whether I read them. They will read them if they like them–and I have no interest in tethering my self-esteem to the preferences of a fluid and finicky audience like tumblr or any particular audience on any site. I could chase fads. I could squeeze out content that I don’t think is my best work, but which is enough for people to like or reblog, but that is something I simply have no interest in doing. My first and foremost goal is to write well; if I cannot gain my own acclaim, then everyone elses’ is simply worthless.
Second thing: your comment seems to support the notion that I ought to simply ignore trolls and post stories and be a more positive person. The positivity doctrine is implied, of course–but it’s there all the same. But what you have failed to realize in all of this is that, as much as the stories are fantasy, Wesley Bracken is a character too. He is a faux-person who I manipulate in online communities, who I hide behind. This arrangement was initially out of fear–and that fear lingers as a motivator. Not many people would like these stories linked to their real names. But there is a secondary motivation which has increased over the last year or so, and that is the realization that I can have Wes say things that I myself cannot. And this blog has become a place where, more than simply posting stories to get people off, I can present a sort of critique of a kind of worldview that I viscerally dislike, a worldview which, I might add, your comment hints that you subscribe to.
It is also this worldview which has, over the past few months, sapped my creativity. I no longer feel any real desire to engage with it on a fictional basis–if anything, by current desires lie more along the lines of writing critical essays. That is what gives me pleasure, at the moment, because writing these stories was never solely about physical pleasure for me–it was about taking the kinds of people I despised and twisting them and their worlds into something new. It was ripping apart their identities and reassembling them into something they both could and could not recognize. It was about celebrating change–but not positive change, not the change of self-actualization, but chaotic change, change that can’t be controlled, that doesn’t place individuals on linear paths towards some unrealized ideal. It asserts a simpler fact–change is death. Change is, has been, and always will be death. These stories have been my way of exploring this notion from a variety of perspectives, but lately I have had the distinct feeling that the well has begun to run dry–but that is something I will discuss in more detail a bit further on.
Third thing: I paired those two questions up for good reason, and I answered them in the manner I did for particular reasons. The reasons I have for slowing down my schedule are personal, and they are long-winded, but more than anything, they are reasons that I don’t particularly care to share with many people right now. That said, I will share some of them anyway, but not in a particularly clear headed way, as I would prefer. Call it a rough draft, but it isn’t ready for easy consumption.
Now then, here are some of those *reasons*.
1.
This genre has appeared to me, more and more, like a philosophical dead end. That said, I know that it isn’t one, but until I discover the door through that I sense, writing more of these stories in their current form feels like I’m banging my face into a brick wall. Banging your face into a brick wall is not only not very pleasurable, it is usually counter-productive. It is very hard to find one’s way out of a dead end if one must constantly wipe the blood from one’s eyes.
2.
When I began writing in this genre, I had a number of excellent authors to mimic and steal from and use to develop my own style and stories. Onix, Peircedskin, and E. S. Morwood all stood as they great examples of what I could do with these stories. Now, however, none of these great writers have produced much of anything new (with the exception of Peircedskin, and only then after some severe nagging). Writing within a genre alone is a boring thing, and I came to realize that part of what I have been missing are people to write *with*. I also realized that the reason I started writing these stories in the first place is because I could no longer find the stories I wanted to read–so I had decided to write my own to fill that perceived gap.
I had a worrisome thought–was I, at least partially–the cause of this dearth of other authors? Had I become so prolific that I was satisfying enough of the audience’s need, all on my own, to suppress others’ need to contribute their own work? This is, probably, me thinking far too highly of myself. More likely, this busy schedule had simply sucked away any time I might have had to find and read other authors working in the genre. Yet there was really only one way to find out–I had to cut back either way, I had to remove the water from the well and see if other people would start supplying it, or had been supplying plenty all along, and people did start supplying it/have been supplying it You are one fine example. Bad Dirty Trickster is another. I’m exhausted of the routine–I do not have the energy right now to put out the amount of content that I have been. And not putting out content has allowed other authors a chance to step out and gain recognition. I cannot say with any certainty that me stepping back enabled you and others to step forward–most likely they were not connected in the least. But not having to carry that burden all by myself is a relief all the same.
3.
With no one else to read, or rather, with few author’s whose works I found compelling within the genre, at the moment, I have felt…at a bit of a loss about what to write next. There is a very nice Ira Glass quote about taste that sums up much of what I have been feeling as of late. I feel like, for a long while, I had writing that I could look up to and admire and strive to be, but lately, I look at my own writing and I realize that I am still unsatisfied with it for a wide variety of reasons, but when I look for an example of what I’d *like* to write, there does not seem to be anything that I admire. It is the sensation of forgetting a word that you should know, in the back of your head, and it never leaves me as I write these stories now. This notion that I am missing something key, something important. I have managed to produce glimpses of it in some of my recent sketches, but nothing substantial. In my heart, I know that the only way past this sensation is to write more, and try to capture that word through effort, but the more effort I put in, the more I slam my head into that brick wall I mentioned earlier. It has become a catch-22. If I do not write, I know that I will never reach the level of taste that I desire, but the more I keep writing stories which I consider to be lackluster and mired in a genre which I worry might have no real future, I become increasingly discouraged that such an ideal might be achievable, and blind myself to my own progress towards it.
*
I sincerely hope that these answers are not satisfactory to you. They are not satisfactory to me. But that is a glimpse into the personal, long-winded reasons for why I have cut back my own output. As for making myself look the fool–of course I look the fool. Writing is a fool’s errand, a mission only fools take. You are a fool too–and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’ll be.
Bracken's Corner 