“I quit.”

Really, I just wanted to say that, just once. I’m too obsessive-compulsive to quit anything once I’ve made a beginning, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like. So sometimes I daydream about quitting as a writer. I daydream about it quite a lot these days, for various reasons. It always disheartens me even more than… well… everything else does. It isn’t until I start thinking about what life might be like as a non-writer that I realize just how much of my identity is bound up in writing. Granted, I usually end up wondering if anybody would even notice if I did quit writing, but that’s a different matter. Whether anybody notices what I write or not, I am a writer.

I haven’t been able to write for a while now. (Depression; I don’t want to talk about it here.) It’s unhealthy for me, not only as a writer but as a person. Like I said, a good deal of my identity is bound up in the act of writing. I have heard people liken the act of giving your writing to someone else as almost on a par with being stripped bare in public. It isn’t quite that bad, especially once one gets accustomed to letting one’s imagination out into the world where anyone might see it. When one gets to a certain point, it’s actually worse to go unnoticed than it is to be under the searchlight. Think about it: if one’s identity is deeply invested in a certain activity, and that activity is ignored for the most part, one easily falls into some serious existential issues.

Anyway… I’m trying to resolve these issues as best I can. In the meanwhile, I am planning for the summer at this point. My new multiple-novel project has gotten too dark for my own good, so I have put it to bed for a little while. Like I said earlier, I’m too obsessive to quit anything I’ve begun, so I’m working again on the Last Book of the Kings series. This poses its own set of problems, including another set of overlapping novels. I suppose that I’m writing this post in order to ask a favor of friends and readers: please cheer me on. I don’t ask things like this often or easily, but I don’t want to give up on this part of my life. Those of you who have read / enjoyed the Keeper stories especially, I’m looking to you for reminders of where this series has gone already as I attempt to bring it to completion.