I Will Write A Novel Again

tyunglebower ♦ May 28, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

That title might sound as mundane and redundant as it does off and confusing. After all, this is the place where I talk about writing, particularly fiction, on as close to weekly basis as I can.

The post immediately previous to this one mentions ideas for fiction, and whether to follow them. Most of the posts deal with advice of various kinds based my experience as an author.

And not long after the start of 2025 I posted my my clear intention to write a space opera as my next longform fiction project.

Why reassert recently established plans? Because my life itself even more recently drastically and forever changed.

My mother died in the hospital a mere two weeks after I published the last post.

Worse, I feel she need not have died at that time, but for some lackluster medical care.

Though I will likely carry that belief for the rest of my own life, along with my grief, I am not here to detail same. I love my mother, and she me, and she died–you require no deep expertise into the intricacies of the human experience to conclude the nature of what I am going through in broad strokes. And if you have experienced such a loss yourself, you know even more.

I am here to say that I have spent the last several months, as Hospice was discussed, (but never achieved), and after Mom died feeling quite far from any creative impulse. Grief, guilt, weakness, depression, ands other related reactions to losing a loved one conspired to disgust me away from even the notion of writing any more fiction, (or performing any more theatre.)

After all, what is the point of creating if in addition to my usual poor readership numbers, even my own mother will be absent, forever form this life, to directly experience it. (Or experience me creating it if nothing else.)

Writing is draining enough in the good times, when few people care about what you have added to the world. When one of the few people that cared about anything you ever did or was is gone in the earthly sense, why break my back adding color to a world that now lack sufficient amounts of light to even see it with my own eyes?

It seemed quite near grotesque; the idea of being so frivolous as to write my little tales of ghosts or space or murder mysteries. The perpetual void of audience indifference I threw all such completed work toward from a distance was nothing compared to the singularity emerging at the center of my galaxy–dense enough to swallow love and dreams themselves.

In short, who fucking cares about writing? About story? About performing and presenting?

That, at long last, brings me to this post, and title of same.

How did everything change? In sincerity, it didn’t. Not entirely. Everything I said above continues to hang over me as I ponder not only the future of my writing, but the future of my life on Earth itself.

The questions are not answered, the depression not lightening, the fear of failing again no dispelled.

Nor do I know the details of writing another novel right now. It may or may not be the space opera I keep running my mouth about. That could be among the sillier, more useless types of story possible in wake of my status.

Then again, a probing, literary exploration of the darkness of human reality in wake of loss and aloneness, (despite being very much where I find myself much of the time) would seem to parallel swallowing dry stale break whole at this point.

Who knows?

The same question applies to how long the next novel will take compared to previous ones; when I will start, if it will be the final novel or if others will follow for the rest of however long my life is; if I will bother promoting it or not; if I will even publish the thing; will i even feel the same about writing the damn thing whatever it is by the time I’m doing it, as oppose to giving up for good once I know what being in author in a post-Mom world feels like, and whether the end product, should it happen, be worth a damn.

And of course, whether it is still in me at all.

Notwithstanding very little movement in my mood and the plethora of unanswered questions, a mere subset of which I lay out above, I set the intention, on this day, to start/write a novel again. And if I can muster even the minutest fraction of an answer as to “why?” the best I can offer is this:

By pure statistics, I could have as much as four decades or more remaining on this planet before I join my mother in whatever plain she now exists. If I am to get anything at all out of those years, even if only a version or tolerable survival of same, I must embrace mindful processes more than results. This is something I have yet to master and may not master by the time I too am just shy of 84.

I’d like to sound more triumphant than that for you. But my Mom died, and believe or not this all is a far and loud cry from where I was weeks ago.

Today, that must suffice for me, and certainly for everyone else.