Why do I keep doing this?
After living in Iowa for 12 years, I recently did what I’d been threatening to do for some time: I moved back to Michigan.
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on getting money and affairs in order so I can struggle a little less week over week to make ends meet. Part of that has involved me doing a light audit of my lifestyle, there’s one thing that on paper doesn’t make any sense: Writing and self-publishing.
When I’m writing as much as I think I ought to be it takes hours out of my week. When I’m going through the publication process as thoroughly as I want to be, it takes thousands out of my bank account.
There’s a case to be made that my quality life would increases if I stop writing.
The thing is, though, I didn’t plan to stop. In doing this light audit of my finances and lifestyle, I found myself automatically including room for writing and self-publishing.
It comes back to a question I’m frequently asked: “Why do you write books?”
I usually kind of shrug off the question, “It’s just what I do.” And go about my day.
But now—partially as a way to justify the work to myself—I’m going to try to get to the bottom of it.
Well, doc, I think it all started in my childhood …
I started writing stories as early as kindergarten. But I enjoyed story telling even before that.
One of my most vivid memories from preschool was playing pirates with the other kids. I don’t remember the details other than that it was sunny, there were “Aye ayes” and “arghhs” and I was having a great time. I remember it being my idea to play pirates and that, being kids, we all were making up things that were happening “Watch out for that cannon ball!” “Yarrr! Me peg leg!” and that we were having a great time.
Around that same time, I was insistent that I learn how to read.
There was a whole world of symbols and meaning that I didn’t have access to at that age. By reading, you could magically get a deeper understanding of something without having someone there to explain it to you. By writing, you could conjure scenes of lush tranquility or charred emotion; you could convey information or entertain.
I liked the idea that I could write words to spark imagination, so I started writing little, illustrated stories that I wish I still had.
I always loved writing and English, but there’s a chance it might have fallen by the wayside as I got older were it not for a particular event.
Around 2006, my parents got divorced.
Suddenly, I would spend two days at one house, then two days at the other, then three at the first, then two at the second, two at the first, three at the second. And so on and so on, ad nauseum.
For various related reasons, I was never really able to get a job or a car during this time.
So I was in a situation where I had little to no control over my situation.
But what I could control and have consistent was writing.
Shortly before the divorce, I started writing a project I called “Element Keepers.” Possibly because I started working on it right before my life was ransacked, I turned the fantasy novel of four kids escaping into a magical world as my main project.
My dad wouldn’t let me date and wasn’t generally great with my friends (he interrupted a hang out with one of my friends so that he could yell at me and threaten to kill my mom’s partner) so I didn’t get out much or have many friends who saw both places I lived.
But I did have a lot of time to write.
I drafted and re-drafted and, eventually, I published “Element Keepers” at the end of high school. Since I had no real money for editors or designers, the book was riddled with typos and formatting errors. But I was proud of it at the time.
As high school ended, I still knew I wanted to be a writer. Though I knew the money wouldn’t be easy to find in fiction publishing, I kept with it. I decided to go to school with journalism in mind. That could be my forward facing pursuit while I kept fiction writing in the background.
Maybe I’d get lucky and my books would take off.
College days
Art for the defunct podcast me and some friends wrote, recorded, and performed in in college. - Art by Nicholas Meyer
I look back at college with a lot of undue regret.
I was living around a bunch of people I liked and was able to meet new people I generally liked every day. But I wish I’d met more people, I wish I’d taken more risks.
The fact of the matter is, though, I was coming out of a situation where I didn’t have a lot of control of my schedule—so while a lot of people where taking advantage of the freedoms college offered, I came to campus looking for consistency. I think I missed out on a lot of quintessential college experiences because of that, but that’s the only way I was capable of experiencing that time of my life.
I’d also moved several states away with no clear financial plan or safety net, so a screw up held extra consequences insofar as it would take my family a minimum of 6 hours to get to me if something went terribly wrong.
I wrote very little of “Element Keepers” in college, but wrote very much in general.
I wrote for the school newspaper, I wrote a defunct weekly personal blog for two years, I wrote short stories and essays for classes, I wrote scripts with friends for a defunct podcast, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons and eventually wrote my own campaign for that.
I think in my sophomore or junior year it fully clicked for me that I could be as weird as I wanted with my in-class writing and people would need to give me feedback, so I started taking big writing swings in those classes. Swings I wouldn’t have tried for outside of that environment (including writing a screenplay titled “Porno” and a stage play that dared to ask “Can God say the ‘n-word’?”.)
It was probably good that I didn’t do much book writing since it gave me chances to get uncomfortable, to flex my creativity.
I still managed to make some headway in Element Keepers #2, but that draft was running long. Too long. I’d written half the length of the first book and was only a fifth of the way through the story, so I put it away until I could figure out a way to make it work.
In hindsight, I wish I’d done even less writing in college and found a way to enjoy the experience a bit more.
That said, I struggle to think of a time I was happier than when I was working for fun in a too hot attic with my friends on a weird podcast that was going nowhere.
Working world
I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who has an easy transition out of college.
Right after I graduated, me and my then-long-term girlfriend decided to stay together. While my initial plans had been to move home for a bit after college and figure things out, I adjust those so that I could stay in Iowa and started looking for a job.
Within six months, I had finished the book I remain most proud of and found the worst job I’ve ever had.
In November of 2018, I all but completed the first full draft of The Wilderlands. The same week I finished most of that work, I got a job offer. (In fact, I remember sitting in a cafe and writing The Wilderlands when the job offer hit my e-mail.)
I accepted.
I made $12.50 an hour working 20-40 minutes away from my apartment (there where two offices and it would depend where they needed me working that day). It was a morning newspaper for which I both had to report and do page layout—meaning I’d be in at 7 a.m. doing page layout and then, I’d still be working at 7 p.m. when a city council or school board meeting rolled around, and I’d stay awake past that to try to write something up about the meeting.
Very quickly, I was depressed, irritable, gaining bad weight, and sinking into debt that I only recently managed to wipe out.
My then-girlfriend moved back in with her parents and we agreed to be long distance until we found a place to live together.
I tried to write over and over again, but only managed to eek out a few video essays that since been delisted and fumbled through the first dozen or so pages of a screenplay.
It does not feel like an exaggeration to say that from December of 2018 to April of 2019, there was no joy in my life.
I quit that job in tears in April or May 2019. I didn’t have another job lined-up for certain, but the other paper I’d interviewed at extended me an offer the following week.
I realized my then-girlfriend and I both lacked the will and resources to make a relationship work. I broke things off in November of 2019.
In the background of all of this I hadn’t written much, but I’d put out hundreds of queries to try to get “Element Keepers” and The Wilderlands traditionally published.
It wasn’t until after the pandemic hit in March of 2020 that I started really dipping writing again.
I wrote a couple more video essays, a sketch or two, some short stories, I dabbled with the idea of creating an easy-to-shoot version of Two Gentlemen of Verona (which I thought I could cleverly title, Two Gentlemen of Corona(virus) — thankfully, this did not materialize). In November of 2020, rather than focus on COVID or the election, I wrote most of another novel that will never see the light of day.
Work-wise, I stayed with the company I’d been working with but picked up and moved to a bigger city with a slightly bigger paycheck.
I was still depressed and anxious, though I don’t think I realized how severe things still were at the time.
I joined a local writing group that met every Saturday. I started writing a new stand-alone fantasy that I still one day hope to finish and publish.
I also started picking up “Element Keepers” again.
As much as I wanted to just write the second book, the first book had been self-published already. That first book was too long and typo riddled for me to just pick up and go along as I had before. What started as me just polishing that book quickly became a deluge of serious revisions and cuts.
For a little while, I kept on trying to get the book traditionally published, but continued to be rejected.
So, I looked at the text—now retitled Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy—and decided I’d done too much work to not put it out there. So I went back through the process of self-publishing and got the book released in June of 2022.
I didn’t make a profit on that book, but I felt confident I had enough of a handle on the situation that I could self-publish The Wilderlands. I went back into that text and started revising and rewriting.
In December of 2022, my full time job furloughed me. Meaning I went without work or pay for two weeks that year. It wasn’t the first time that had happened within the company, but it was the first time a furlough had extended to me.
Around that time, I got another offer to work at another publication. Smaller, with worse benefits, but with better base pay and a place where I felt I could make more of an impact.
For about 8 months, I worked as an Arts & Culture editor for a alt-weekly magazine. There were a lot of bad things about that job, but they were never as bad as that first job and the highs were higher than the second job(s).
In the background of that work, I continued getting The Wilderlands ready for publication.
Then, in fall of 2023, my hours at the alt-weekly were cut in half.
I was halfway through working on The Wilderlands and had people to pay despite not having a consistent income. Worse still, student loans were about to start up again after a COVID-era pause.
I managed to get a job in T.V. news within a month or so.
While there were issues with this job, and it certainly didn’t have the highs of the previous two jobs, it was the best environment I’d yet worked in.
The work I needed done on The Wilderlands caused my publishing budget to balloon. I took out a personal loan and a 401K loan in order get the project across the finish line.
I published The Wilderlands in late-October of 2024. I was wildly proud of that book. I still am. I released an audiobook a year later.
While neither published book has earned its budget back, it’s becoming apparent that profiting could be possible so long as the books are good and I’m lucky enough with timing.
So, though I have no net gains to show for it, I write on.
So what’s the why?
After writing out and looking back over my writing journey, the question I’ve been looking to get answered: “Why do I keep writing?” perhaps self-evident.
I am here, writing out my experiences to try to make sense of them. In order to solve a problem or answer a question, I try to walk myself through what I know.
This applies in fiction as well.
I’ve never really considered it before this moment, but now I’ve taken time to think about what questions I’ve been trying to answer with my writing.
For Element Keepers/Light Keeper Chronicles, I think, the question is: Where are the lines between exploitation, heroism, and sacrifice?
For The Wilderlands, I think the question is: Why do people hate and kill? And what does it take for someone to change?
For my other Work-In-Progress, the question is: What does it take to get by in a world that doesn’t particularly want you to?
Which brings me nicely to the other reason I keep doing this despite operating at a loss.
I work in news and, as you can see from the above, it’s not exactly the most stable industry. Even at my current job, which I like pretty well, our company exist in the shadow of a corporate buy out that’s gone through but might be reversed depending on how things go in court. It’s impossible to say for certain what will happen to my job once a decision is made either way.
So, while the books aren’t making money now, I do hope that—one day—they’re making enough money in the background that I can have a little bit of a cushion if life goes sideways again.
I think I can get it to work, it’s just a matter of getting it to work.
Even it I can’t, though, I think I’ll keep on doing it.
Maybe not forever though.
As much as I love writing and as much as writing has been a constant in my life, I’ve been thinking about what I’ll do when I finish the handful of projects I currently hope to put out.
I hope for my sake that there’s a future where I’ve worked through the big questions I want to ask myself and I’m stable enough that I don’t need to use writing and self-publish as copium.
While I’m certainly only writing now because I do ultimately enjoy it, it’s nice to imagine a day where I’ve said what I need to say. It’s nice to imagine that one day my writing will have either have been successful or it won’t have.
If it is successful, perhaps there’s a world where I am able to write a book every couple of years, secure in what that book will be able to provide for me.
If unsuccessful, which is perhaps most likely even in the long run, I will have a catalogue of finished fantasy series for young adults, a stand alone adult fantasy or two, and perhaps a science fiction novel that I cart out every so often.
“I wrote these,” I’ll be able to tell people. “It was a lot of fun. I’m glad I did it. But I found other ways to work through what I need to work through and I’m doing a lot better since then.” It’ll be a fun, cute bit of trivia about me and the things I’ve done rather than this grand, passionate dictate of my existence.
Then I will live my life and, perhaps three or four times a year, I’ll sit down and do a bit of writing. Writing that is not for work, writing that does not aspire to be read, but merely writing for the sake of entertainment for only myself—to be shared only if I earnestly feel like it.
*****
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The Wilderlands is available for physical purchase now from Barnes & Noble and Amazon or wherever you read ebooks. The audiobook is also out now on most major platforms.
Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy is available for physical purchase from Schuler Books, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon or wherever you read ebooks.