Unplanned Major Hiatus (Patreon)

The Avenists, my highest tier and most appreciated backers, did not get their regular Tuesday update because I couldn't get the work done.  And this was after I had to extend my usual monthly writing break because I had the same problem the week before.  Today...  I woke up planning to announce another schedule skip, to pass through the update cycle as normal, but after trying all day to finish the chapter that was due days ago and failing to make any progress on it, I've had to stop and consider my position.

Earlier in the week I had an epiphany: this sensation is familiar.  The last time I had this combination of overall depression, total creative block, and serious stress about the above, was in the final months of my work on TGAB, and that culminated in such total burnout that I had to stop working entirely.

Today, taking a hard look at my current circumstance, I had another epiphany.  Creative failure aside, I am in extremely bad shape mentally.  I'm constantly exhausted no matter how much I sleep, my eyes look like I've been awake for a week straight despite getting my eight hours a night.  My appetite is a complete wreck, I'm dealing with depression of a caliber that's keeping me from doing anything, and I've been having nightmares basically every night.  This is one of those things that I feel pretty dumb for not having noticed earlier but, well, they're hard to see coming up on you until you're in one.

This is a crisis.  I am having a serious mental health episode of some kind.

The last time it was this bad I had to stop writing entirely for four months, and when I was able to resume, my story, which I love with all my heart, had become an actual trauma trigger and I couldn't even look at it, forcing me to switch to a different one.  I cannot let that happen to OVDT, too.  It's now been a few weeks of this; with TGAB I tried to push through it for months until it ultimately broke me.  I have to stop before it gets that far this time.

So, this is my plan to address this.

I am going to take, to begin with, the rest of June off.  I should probably seek some kind of actual mental health care but that's still outside my means given my situation so I am going to devote myself fully to recovering.  I'm going to make it my full-time job to do all the things I know help stabilize my brain when I'm in a bad depressive episode: get my daily exercise, eat healthy, sleep as much as my body wants to sleep, do my breathing and meditation exercises every day, and not be under the stress of a publication schedule.

I will stay in communication with everybody, via my discord server and with posts here on Patreon, which will be available to the public.  By the end of the month I'll assess my situation and decide what to do.

Basically, the likely options are: extend the hiatus if I need more time to recover, return to my normal publication schedule if I feel recovered, possibly return on a more limited schedule, or possibly switch to working on a different story.

That brings me to the third epiphany I've had, and the matter that will have the biggest impact on my long-term plans: OVDT itself is what's killing me.  This isn't exactly news, I know I've talked about this in various places before, but I didn't realize it was this serious.  To recap for those who haven't seen my previous commentary on the subject, I started writing OVDT as a kind of therapy project, to confront and work through some of the issues I was grappling with.  That has backfired on me because of the standard authorial tendency to underestimate how long a story takes to write.  The planned arc of OVDT does lead to a more uplifting perspective than it has now, but I was originally expecting that to start, like...a year ago.  Based on current story progress, we're about halfway to that point.

I've gotta stop.  For a while; I am definitely not abandoning this story.  I just don't know how long a while it's going to be.  Maybe just these two weeks, or possibly long enough for me to write something else for a while.

Right now, there are no other major stressors in my life.  The only factor I can identify that could be causing me this kind of mental distress - I mean, aside from my customary mental illness, which as a rule does not feel like this - is this story.  This story which, I realize now that I think about it clearly, is keeping me in a position of being immersed constantly in the exact soup of issues that was causing me stress and trauma in the first place.  Yeah, hindsight is 20/20.  

So, this is it for me for this month.  As I promised, I will stay in touch and stay transparent.  Updates will be on this Patreon account and on my Discord server at discord.gg/DQgsYm9.  By the end of the month I'll let everybody know what progress I've made and what's happening next.

I'm more grateful than I'll ever be able to express to all of you.  It means the world to me that people read and like my work; I'm constantly awed that people actually want to support me financially for it.  I'm incredibly sorry that it keeps being interrupted like this; I hate it every time.  Frustrating as it is, this is the result of lessons learned.  Experience has taught me to accept the smaller interruptions with grace so they don't turn into bigger ones, and I'm sorry for failing to apply that lesson adequately.  This bigger one is happening because I wouldn't heed the signs and stop earlier, because I can't stand to disappoint the people who want to keep reading.  I'm going to do my best to make sure this interruption doesn't grow any bigger than it already has to, and I apologize for the misjudgments and failures on my part that led to this.

I'll be back soon.  Thank you for everything, and I'm sorry.