Creative Wellbeing
“You’re a writer? That must be so much fun. How on Earth do you find the time, though?”
“I’m really enjoying The Brotherhood of the Eagle series. When’s the next book coming out?”
“Congratulations on getting your Kickstarter funded – that’s so awesome! I can't wait for the audiobooks.”
I was chatting to a fellow author recently about how creativity and your own personal wellbeing are intrinsically linked. The past 12-18 months have been a strange mix, which I don’t think is all that unusual. Normal life brings with it its highs, lows and lots of ordinary days in between. However, it’s fair to say that in my personal and work life things haven’t been easy. My wife and I both work full-time (no, I’m not a full-time writer yet!). This allows us to enjoy a good lifestyle but both our roles can be very demanding at times. We also found ourselves in the position where my wife, both my children and other members of our immediate family have all gone through sustained periods of ill-health, and we’re not out of the woods on that score yet.
Just over a year ago I reached the point where all of these things were getting on top of me and, for the first time in my life, I was off work with stress. This experience is actually far more common than people realise and, after talking it through with my GP, it was obvious you can only be under a sustained period of stress for so long before it starts to take a physical toll. I’ve always had times at work where I’ve been under pressure but my GP patiently pointed out when that’s also coming at you from other sources as well it has a much greater impact. I might not want to admit it, but I’m also getting older and now I’m in my fifties I’m not as resilient as I once was.
Consequently, 2023 was a massive wake up call for me (my symptoms put me in A&E, so frankly I was grateful to discover I wasn’t having a heart attack) and since returning to work full-time I’ve tried to change my approach and mindset. Whilst I was signed off work I was expecting my GP to tell me I needed a complete break from everything as I sheepishly confessed I was in the middle of a book launch (this was all happening a few weeks before A Quiet Vengeance was due to be released). She surprised me by advising the very opposite, explaining how merely sitting around doing nothing at all wasn’t a healthy approach. Recovering from a stress-related illness is as much about doing those things you love which help you relax as it is about taking a break from the situation that is giving rise to the stress in the first place.
Looking back, I followed this advice to the letter but not necessarily with the application of common sense.
What is writing to me? My answer would have varied over the years, depending upon when you asked that question. Thirty years ago it was an experiment. I kept a diary because I was bored and as I tried to find work and figure out what I wanted from life I thought it would be fun to record my job-hunting and wider life experiences in the style of Bridget Jones (I really must burn those diaries). By 2003 things had moved on and creative writing was a hobby. I wanted to see if I was able to produce a novel-length work and I did – the dreaded trunk novel, which is every author’s rite of passage. In 2014 it was my main hobby, and by then I thought I might be good enough to approach a literary agent and make a proper go of this. By 2020 I’d successfully secured the services of an agent but when publishers didn’t go for The Brotherhood of the Eagle I began to think about going independent. In 2021, having independently released my first novel, Hall of Bones, the year before, I was wondering whether it was a good idea to enter the seventh Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off competition (spoiler warning – it was!).
As I write this in 2024 it’s obvious that something changed at an indeterminate point along the way. I’ve released four novels, I’m currently editing my fifth ready for publication later this year and seen my short fiction published in two separate and critically acclaimed anthologies. In addition I’ve also been releasing a bi-monthly short story series called The Wolf Throne which I think might, just might, be one of my best novels when it’s finished. I’m also branching out this year with two audiobook releases (a short story collection called A Roll of the Dice and the first book in The Brotherhood of the Eagle series, Hall of Bones). Put another way, I’ve become an authorpreneur and creative writing is now my second job, which I run as a business in my spare time.
My GP’s advice about doing what I loved was absolutely right but I suspect she hadn’t quite appreciated the scale of the undertaking when I was talking about creative writing. I recently took stock on my immediate ‘to do’ list and came up with the following:
Write June blog post about pacing myself
A Roll of the Dice eBook proofing, setup & publish
A Roll of the Dice audiobook proofing, setup & publish
Broken Brotherhood 2nd edit
The Wolf Throne short story #9
Hall of Bones audiobook proofing, setup & publish
Broken Brotherhood final edit, proof & ARCs
Broken Brotherhood, proofing, setup & publish
Attending WorldCon in Glasgow in August
Attending the Fantasy & Sci-Fi Spotlight event in September in Shrewsbury
A Quiet Betrayal 1st Draft
A Quiet Conquest 1st Draft
That’s before you factor in a fair amount of time spent on social media, writing book reviews for Page Chewing, helping other authors with their own projects, keeping on top of my accounts and paying the bills associated with all this.
This is a list of things I love doing (well, maybe not the accounts). It’s also a very long list. Aside from the events, you’ll note there are no dates included and that’s deliberate. I’d reached the point where I was struggling to keep on top of everything across the board. Something had to give and I realised for the first time that thing had to be writing.
My next novel, Broken Brotherhood, is probably 95% complete. Beta reading feedback and edits are in and they have been broadly positive. There are some obvious things to tackle, which is normal after a first draft, and it won’t take long to do that work. However, the reality is I don’t have the energy right now to finish off that final 5% and I need a break. It’s not that I don’t want to work on the novel – I simply can’t. The same thing applies to The Wolf Throne, where I need to do some more work on the plot, to make sure the second half is as strong and coherent as the first. But right now I can’t see a way to put all of that together and the problem simply feels beyond me.
This is not a crisis. This simply reflects I have a lot on personally, which limits my energy levels, and also professionally when it comes to creative writing. I have a lot of projects lined up, and I’ve had to accept I can’t do them all at once. The above list is actually about me scaling things back, tackling one task at a time, giving myself a break from certain projects and slowly getting things under control.
I’m not worried about my goal of releasing Broken Brotherhood in 2024. I’m pretty confident it will happen, but I’m also in a place where if it doesn’t that’s not a disaster. The most important thing is that book is as good as it possibly can be when it comes to release – the crucial difference here is doing things well, not just doing them fast.
Put another way, I need to make sure writing is once more about relaxation rather than obligation. And the great news is my June blog is now crossed off my to do list.
