"Does any of this matter? Is this thing even on?"

When I was a kid, there used to be catalogues of text-only T-shirts with often off-color but sometimes profoundly philosophical sayings on them. This is a niche taken up these days by operations like TeeFury and Threadless and TeeTurtle, but one I remember in particular was a shirt I coveted for years that said “Onward through the fog.”

It seems like a pretty good motto, honestly.

One thing I’ve been hearing over and over again recently from writer friends is that a real sense of frustration and lack of purpose seems to be afflicting us all. I’ve definitely felt the malaise myself: am I writing books that anyone is going to read? Stories that anyone is going to care about?

Am I just shouting into the void here?

It’s hard, when you’re not shiny and new and Talked About anymore, to somehow get through those doldrums without any kind of external validation. Harder, I think, than even the long road to first publication, and the struggle to break in. Because then you have the hope of that breakout debut to sustain you, and at this point in my career the only way I’m going to get a breakout debut is if I start publishing under another name. (Which is definitely a fallback plan that’s in the cards—I’m not going to lie.)

And it’s funny in some respects that I feel this way, because while it has been extremely hard to sell a book lately, the White Space series is selling better and getting more pull than anything I’ve ever written. But the most recent one of those came out in 2020, and while the third one is finished in draft I don’t currently have a US publisher for it (we’re still working on that) and I’m waiting for edits from the UK publisher, so it feels very in-limbo right now.

Meanwhile, I’m going to be continuing the Karen Memory Adventures as an indie series, since my editor at the previous publisher retired and said previous publisher isn’t interested in publishing any more books in the series.

That makes me wonder if there’s a point in pushing forward with those—but I still get fan mail about the two existing books. So somebody is reading and enjoying them! It’s just hard to remember that in the face of the malaise.

And I have the next one written, and at least one more after that plotted out, so Karen will be back in 2024. I haven’t decided yet if I’m running a Kickstarter or just straight self-publishing. And I’ve been working on a mystery series, and a Nordic fantasy, and feeling my way into a near-future SF story about ecological calamity.

So it’s not like I’m not working.

But in the past few years I’ve mostly published one novel (The Origin of Storms) in a series that, frankly, hasn’t sold very well at all, and a couple of what I think are very good short stories and a poem that nevertheless haven’t picked up a lot of buzz from anyone. (The most recent is “Here Instead of There,” in Communications Breakdown from MIT Press, about a seastead punkhouse, a terrible legal ruling, and a very bad day for everyone concerned. Others include “The Part You Throw Away” at The Sunday Morning Transport, “Hel on a Headland” at Uncanny, and “Twin Strangers” in Tasting Light. I feel driven to list those out, perhaps, to prove that I still exist.)

And it seems like with a very few exceptions, everybody else I talk to is kind of in the same space of just feeling like there is no point—even folks with multiple awards, national recognition of their work, movie/television deals, and bestsellers under their belts. And I have to wonder what it is that’s causing the general air of exhaustion.

Possibly it’s just my age, and the fact that most of my writer friends have been at this for fifteen or twenty years and the mid-career doldrums are real. There’s a point where it gets hard to hold on, where you’re neither a Hot Young Thing nor an Eminence Of Long Standing. You’re just the literary equivalent of an invisible middle-aged woman. (And for those of us who are also invisible middle-aged women, I suspect it’s doubly hard to feel relevant.)

“What have you done for me lately?” is the question, I guess.

It’s also harder to come up with ideas than it was twenty years ago. I’ve written thirty-eight books, somehow, and a hundred and forty-three short stories, and all the easy ideas are used up now. So sustaining productivity when you’ve written all the stuff you spent a long time thinking about is, well, A Process.

I did not manage to get myself off that hook of but nobody is going to read this yet, but I did manage to have an productive writing year in 2023 without it being a struggle, so I have decided to be happy with that. In part, I did it by accepting that this idea that art is only as worthwhile as the number of people who talk about it on Xitter is profoundly toxic and end-state metastatic late-capitalist.

My self-worth cannot be determined by buzz. Not if I want to be happy.

In addition, I constantly try to remind myself that I do this because it is fun, allegedly. I can write for myself, and tell stories for myself and the people who want to read them, without getting hung up on award nominations or bestseller lists or internet buzz.

Anyway, I finished three novels this year, and started three more, and revised another one. (And will hopefully soon revise a second.) And wrote a short story and a novelette.

Even if I am only writing to myself (and you folks), I will continue to do the work, because the work is worthwhile on its own.

Best,

Bear