Job Replacement Guide: Not Happening (Surprise!)

9 Replies

Hi. My name is Dave and I’m resurrecting my blog. To do this, I need to declare bankruptcy on the Job Replacement Guide project. I haven’t taken a penny from anyone, so by “bankruptcy” I just mean I’m formally throwing in the towel. After nearly 3 years of radio silence I’m guessing this comes as a surprise to no one.

TL;DR once the book was announced I choked. Hard. I couldn’t work on the book and I couldn’t write anything here without talking about the book and so the blog froze and started collecting dust.

I had over 30,000 words written when I announced the book. Now, almost three years later, the book stands at about 34,000 words. It’s looking like it’s going to need to be 70,000 words to cover everything I originally intended to cover, so I effectively got the worst writer’s block in the world right before the book reached being halfway done.

“There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Only lazy writers.” — Sir Terry Pratchett

I don’t have time or space to rebut Sir Terry, but if you’ll allow “lazy” to include “having an emotional crisis and letting it run my life instead of confronting it” then I’ll cop the plea.

I still want to finish the JRG, but I need to kill the project to get the guilt out of my head so I can get things moving again. I’ll try to explain more later but I got so wrapped up in being afraid of being a bad writer that I let it stop me from being a person who does the activity of writing.

I will push out more details to the mailing list when I have them. Feel free to use the comment section here to express your frustration with me, empathy for my situation, sympathy for my decision, or something else entirely.

Okay, with that off my chest, hopefully I’ll be able to use this space again as a blog. I’m not going to make any promises, though–I think that’s a lesson I’ve learned now: ship when I’m ready, and don’t talk about unfinished work. As a result, please understand that I’m probably not going to talk much about alternative options with the JRG. Yes, I’m considering a bunch of alternative options for it. If I get one ready, I’ll ship it.

Cheers!

Dave

9 thoughts on “Job Replacement Guide: Not Happening (Surprise!)”

      1. Kazriko

        Maybe there will be more room for the discussion on Costa Vida dominance over Cafe Rio here. 😉

  3. Avdi Grimm (@avdi)

    “Don’t talk about unfinished work” – this has been one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned, and it still bites me regularly. In my case, I’ve come to realize that talking about something I’m planning has the same emotional release of actually doing it. So as soon as I talk about it, my unconscious mind says “OK, done!” and the project loses all of its mojo.

    Congrats on moving on!

    Reply ↓
    1. dbrady Post author

      Thanks! And amen to sucking up the mojo. I’ve read several authors warn against telling anybody an unwritten story idea because that satisfies their need to tell the story, and that need is what drives them to write.

      Reply ↓

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