TL;DR: I almost gave up entirely, but have decided not to.
I have written a little application to manage my archive of stories. At first, it was to import a Twitter archive, but I have extended it to also import a Mastodon archive, and to merge the two. It’s where I write the comments/annotations[1] you see in my yearly[2] summaries, and I can put tags on stories so I can easily find fairytales, for instance.
I have written a few export templates – for yearly and monthly collections and a few others – and over Christmas I wrote one to export a count of stories per month.
There are a few noteworthy things on this graph. The first is the summer of 2017 – my department got closed down and I was made redundant. I found a new job, but I had to commute by car rather than by train. It turns out I wrote a lot of stories during those 25 minutes on the train in the morning and evening, and, to little susprise, I can’t write while driving.
The next was the burnout I suffered at the end of 2021. I had moved countries with my family and started a new job with new technologies, and spent a lot of time in the autumn preparing and doing the paperwork for the sale of our house in England. When that was finally completed, I crashed.
It was hard to recover from that, and I still haven’t regained the creativity I had before. A few bouts of Covid haven’t helped, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israeli genocide in Gaza provided a constant background hum of despair.
Early last year we bought a house, a fixer-upper; up-fixing took all my energy for a few months, and kept demanding a lot of brainpower even after we got it to a state where we had most furniture in place. I focused on the needs of my family, my day job, and house work, with little left in the tank for writing, or maintaining Patreon/Ko-Fi.
And then that orange fascist got elected. Again!
The first time he was elected, in 2016, I resolved to stop writing dark stories, nihilist twists, and pessimists proven right. I tried to write stories that were wholesome, where love and kindness and respect and consent and understanding and tolerance were the theme. I like to think that I helped some, that I added some brightness to people’s day.
Then the nazi pumpkin got elected again, on an explicitly evil programme, and, well, no amount of gay dragon stories were going to hold him back. That’s when I almost gave up.
In November, a week after the election, I deleted my X/Twitter account, where this all started back in 2013. I renamed it, registered a new account using the now free name, and deleted my original one.
It was both heartwrenching and necessary.
In the weeks following, it became incredibly hard to come up with ideas for stories, and to find something hopeful or encouraging to say. So I fell silent.
In December 2024 I posted only three stories, the last of which I found in my “needs some polish” file and posted with hardly any changes.
I felt I had nothing to say I hadn’t said before, in one of the four thousand stories I had written over the last twelve years. Or rather, the things I felt I needed to say – stop hating, punch nazis, support the oppressed, be good! – were so big I could not write them small enough.
I exported my story count and made a graph, and looking at it I pretty much concluded that I had reached the end of the line of this endeavour.
I wrestled with how to write the “I give up, thank you all” post for most of January.
Then I got an idea for a silly microstory. And I realised I had been demanding of myself that every story had to be profound, wise, and uplifting, while adressing current events or social injustices.
I had let the constant onslaught of bad news convince me that unless I singlehandedly turned the tide, there was no point in trying.
No. I wouldn’t ask that of anyone else, I shouldn’t ask it of myself.
I’ll tell a stupid joke. I’ll tell a story making an obscure reference that not even a tenth of my readers will get. I will tell a shaggy dog story with an atrocious pun. And if even one person’s day has been made brighter by it, it’s worth doing.
And who knows, I might write something that is wise, or profound, or uplifting too.
I have decided to be kinder to myself, and to keep writing. I’ve reached double digits so far in February, and I’m having fun with it.
[1] Often years later, as I am not a very organised person, so it can sometimes be hard to figure out what I was thinking when writing some stories.
[2] And monthly, if you’re a supporter on Patreon or Ko-Fi. I also use this to collate the ebook of all stories from a year, which you’ll get if you are a Patreon or Ko-Fi, or Hugo Award voter in the years I have become a finalist.