In my last blog post, I talked about what my publishing plans were for the next few years. My ending, however, was a bit cryptic. I said after completing that publication schedule, I had no idea what was next. Well, that engendered messages asking if I was going to stop writing.

What I meant was that I’d accounted for all the rough drafts I had on hand, and once those were published I truly did have no idea what was next. However, the majority of my books-in-waiting were drafted during the annual National Novel Writing Month. The 2023 version starts in two weeks, but my project this year is the rewrite of a draft of The Devil Passed By.

However, I have plenty of NaNoWriMos to come. Not to worry.

Let Me Explain

I can’t imagine a time at any point in my future when I stop writing. I have always written. I will always write. What might change is getting off the marketing merry-go-round. In truth, I spend more time finding ways to say “buy my books” without actually saying “buy my books.” I can’t afford my own publicist, so the creation of graphics, the copywriting, the scheduling of social media posts, the crafting of ads and ad copy, drafting and publishing blog posts, writing and transmitting a newsletter, drafting and recording and editing and posting a podcast, etc., is all on me. Sometimes, I maybe have only an hour or so a day to, you know, write.

That’s not what I envisioned when I retired from Uncle Sam to write for myself. In the first years after retiring, all I did was write new material and edit the bits and pieces of drafts I’d started while full-time employed. Then, when I moved into publishing, at first it was query letters and pitches to agents, followed by query letters and pitches to publishers. That took time away from writing, too. Once I made the decision to be my own publisher, that was when formatting and procuring book covers, finding an editor and beta readers ensued. Hot on those heels came having a social media presence and the dreaded marketing.

All that has meant less and less time actually writing. That’s frustrating to me, even though I understand that social media and marketing are necessary evils in a market with millions of other authors competing with me for readers’ attention.

I’d like to see a time when I write more, prep what I’ve written for publishing, publishing, and then letting the marketing run itself. I haven’t quite figured how to do that, but it’s a goal.

That is, I’d like to write and publish but hop off that marketing ride. Indeed, I’m not sure what that would even look like or how or whether it would work. I know there are writers–usually ones far and away more famous than I could hope to be–who write a book, hand it off to their publishers, dust off their hands, and sit down to write the next book. They don’t have to worry about much marketing; their names and prior work assure them an instant audience of readers buying their books.

Hey, you gotta have goals, right? Even unrealistic ones.

Not Writing as Anathema

I’m aware of two writer friends I’ve made in the last decade who stopped writing, like, cold turkey. Both had enjoyed some success, won some industry awards, and simply stopped. Their choice, of course, and you have to respect that they got to make that choice. Still, I suppose, because writing is so much a part of me, of who I am from the time I was eight or nine years old, I can’t quite grasp the possibility that I could even make that choice. Here and now, I could declare–and I already have–that I will always write.

In the past half-dozen years when I dealt with a potentially life-shortening illness, I still wrote. In the past, going through the grief of losing my parents, my brother, and a marriage, I still wrote. Locked down in the house for COVID, I still wrote–and was pretty damned productive. Today, amid family issues, the world seeming to come apart, the threat to democracy in the country my father fought to preserve, I still write.

Every setback, every lack of success, every loss, I coped with in therapy and by writing. In some cases, writing was more meaningful and settling than the therapy. I can’t envision myself not writing. Not writing is an anathema to me. However, though I still find it hard to understand choosing not to write, it’s incumbent upon me to accept and understand those for whom writing has become anathema. To do otherwise is selfish arrogance.

I’ll probably write about that.

I am a writer. Writing, i.e., storytelling, is in my Irish DNA. (I don’t know for sure, but there had to have been ancestors who were bards, because to me, storytelling is life.) For me to stop writing would be unnatural. That’s me, not anyone else.

So, not to worry. I have plenty of stories left to tell.