Waning motivation

illus by jokanhiyou

Hey y’all, I’m going to be rather unfiltered for a moment. Now, usually I try to put a positive lilt on my blog posts because ‘fake it till you make it,’ right? Well, it’s getting hard for me to be positive day by day. I knew the path of the indie author is a hard one, but I can only keep forcing my optimism for so long.

I did my taxes recently and in the course of making sure the government gets its due, I reported my author income, or lack therefore of. I made less than one week’s worth of groceries for the entire year of 2019 off the sales of Hench. Couple in my expenses and I reported a loss of several thousands of dollars. I would put down the numbers, but when I reached out to a creative community for some support I got wiped away for putting numbers down. Apparently, numbers are offensive. Go figure.

So, with my horrid sales, some difficult beta reviews, and my troubled personal life, I find myself in a rather miserable place. I started writing to try and address my depression that threatened to claim my life, and for a while it helped, but now it’s becoming a source of frustration and depression itself.

At this point, I must seriously consider if the costs of writing my books are worth it to me. I mean not only the financial costs, but also the emotional costs. How many years can I bear to loose thousands of dollars? How much effort can I put forward to promote my work until the futility snuffs my passion? Should I publish a sequel to a book only a few dozen people have read?

The answer to all the above is, I don’t know. But, I do know those questions are rather painful and does my mental health no favors. Also, the pandemic and lost wages aren’t helping one bit. Perhaps if my personal life and the global climate were, well, normal then I’d be more resilient, but as it is now it’s a battle to even open my word processor.

So in closing, I’ll say I don’t know when Epicenter will be published. I don’t know if I’ll even publish it, as the only vestage of my motivation left is ‘sunk cost fallacy.’ To the tiny cadre of people who were awaiting the next book, I’m sorry. The compromise might be to release the text for free on my site and forgo the pretense of profit. I’ll have to mull the prospect over some more before I made a decision.