Audio Segment: My Burnout
Transcript
I wrote my most successful novel in burnout.
Actually, all of my MM romances — everything in the Bear Camp series — has been written and published during the worst creative burnout I’ve ever experienced.
To be very, very clear, I’m not bragging about that at all.
I wish it weren’t true.
It’s hard not to wonder what I might’ve achieved with these books at a different time in my career…
But burnout happens when it happens and the question of how we go on writing is still there.
Burnout is #5 of the Top 20 struggles most often cited by writers.
It’s much more serious and long-lasting than writer’s block — although the symptoms often present together — Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by stress, overworking, self-imposed pressure, and forcing the writing in spite of difficult circumstances.
It can happen to writers of any genre, at any part of the writing process, at any level of success, and at any stage of their careers.
A lack of motivation and interest in writing can make you unwilling and unable to do the thing you love best, and it can lead to you question your entire identity.
Like you, I’ve been writing or thinking about writing or wanting to write my entire life.
I’ve been publishing professionally since 2003.
I define ”professionally” as the point at which writing became the main source of my income.
For the past two decades, I’ve produced mostly non-fiction content. With novels as supplementary passion projects.
11 books, 5 genres, 3 pen names, 2 podcasts… (This is kind of a third.) Thousands of articles, a handful of online courses.
And I developed a trademarked certification program to train coaches in my intuition-building modality.
For the first 3 years of writing professionally, I worked in email marketing. I developed websites and newsletter content for clients.
In the earliest days of blogging, I set up RSS-to-email automations and designed content marketing plans for all different kinds of businesses.
I attempted to teach the strategies to either the owners or their marketing teams, so that they could produce and maintain their own content marketing.
I say attempted because they invariably didn’t want to do the work on their own — and I was not a ghostwriter. This was before we had social media managers.
My clients tended to let these incredible automated systems languish and die, and it was frustrating. It was like building a car for someone who didn’t want to drive it.
I started to wonder is it me? Am I delusional? Is there something wrong with my strategies?
In 2006, around the time I turned 37, I decided to do an experiment — start a personal brand — treat myself as I would a client. Build the same system, see if I could attract an audience.
I chose a topic that wasn’t necessarily easy to monetize or business-y, but something I was genuinely interested in and could produce a lot of content around, and felt like I had something different to contribute.
Throughout my teens, twenties, and thirties, I was a big consumer of self-help, personal development, and alternative spirituality.
But I was always rolling my eyes a bit at the tone, and the packaging, and the branding. Everything was a bit too sweetness and light for me.
I always wanted to strip out some of the syrupy bits and keep what was practical, and present it with a bit of an edge and a down to earth sense of humor.
I thought surely there had to be more people like me out there, who would appreciate that.
I started a blog called Shift Your Spirits.
My tagline was “fewer hearts and flowers than the leading New Age blather.”
It resonated with people.
It became a big hit.
Sometimes, the thing you become most known for is a surprise.
You put something out there, and then it belongs to other people.
If it “sells,” — if it’s popular and people want more of it —
It becomes a job.
I wouldn’t have predicted the success of my personal take on self-help. But my strategy was solid. I was good at it, I was able to monetize it and support myself at a salary I’d never made working for anyone else, and I loved it.
It was incredibly satisfying to help others.
It felt purposeful.
I religiously produced weekly content on the same themes for 15 years.
And I experienced what I would now call “mini burnouts” about twice a year.
At the time, I called it burnout — I would moan to my friends “Oh my God, I’m so burnout.”
And each time I would think “This is it. I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. The well is dry.”
But I usually just needed a reset.
A break.
I used to employ this trick of going through the motions of quitting.
Walk away and pretend I was done… until the ideas started flowing again. I’d realize, Oh, wait. I do have something else to say.
Over time, I learned where to build those into breaks into my calendar.
I would literally schedule mini breakdowns — I had a seasonal pattern.
I identified a practice that helped me during these breaks —
A combination of walking meditation and proprioceptive writing.
My clients and long time listeners came to know it as “the Reboot.”
I used it faithfully.
I recommended it constantly.
I shared it with thousands of people.
The Reboot is essentially a daily walking meditation, daily free writing for 15 -20 minutes, and gratitude journaling.
There are variables and a little more to it than that.
There are levels of how deeply you apply the practice. Particularly around the degree you wish to meditate.
I’ll definitely do an episode about it so I can link to it easily going forward,
If you’re interested in more detail before that episode comes out, or you can’t find the link, email or message me on Facebook and I’ll send it to you.
The Reboot always worked for me.
Until it didn’t.
In 2019, I finally experienced Burnout with a capital B.
Not the little-b burnout we use in everyday conversation.
Something so dark you really don’t want to use the word.
You don’t want to name it.
But the power of naming a thing is crucial for dealing with it.
I was ashamed to admit to anyone how bad it was.
I couldn’t admit it to myself, because I wasn’t prepared for what that might mean.
Was it really over for me?
Would I ever come back from it?
Would I have to cancel edits and make readers wait? Have no response to questions about release dates?
I’d like to blame it on COVID — the timing both confused the issue, maybe exacerbated it, and certainly gave me a bit of cover.
Everyone was going through their own stuff during that time. Nobody was gonna notice if I locked myself in my study with the lights off staring at the pattern on the sound dampening blanket I use to cover the window when I’m recording.
But the truth is, it started well before 2020.
With 15 years worth of podcast segments recorded and a thousand blog posts and articles, I was able to recycle, rerun, repurpose and automate existing older content so that for a few years there, I didn’t have to come up with anything new.
I’d done this before, on a smaller scale, during mini burnouts. A bad week here or there. A month or two. I’d take the buy button off my consulting page and put a closed sign over my public schedule. I’d let my automations run in the background, keep building my lists and sending out content without monetizing anything that wasn’t entirely passive. Just hole up in my study and read for pleasure and work out a lot. Sounds like heaven if you’re looking for a vacation, but there was a lot of shame in it, and pressure to come back.
To get going again.
In November of 2019, I had achieved my ultimate goal of recurring passive income
The minimum amount of money I needed per month to maintain my business and my personal life.
Without giving up anything.
No austerity.
All the typical things I need, consume, enjoy. Nothing crazy extra, but enough to maintain a good life.
And this wasn’t the roller coaster of better than expected one month, windfall, big release… and then months of not quite hitting it… and it all averaging out.
We’re talking Patreon, every month, THE amount I needed for a base salary.
The rest was gravy.
All I had to do was maintain it.
But I had nothing left in that well.
I wasn’t challenged to create anything new.
I knew I was speeding toward a cliff and the track would eventually run out, so, I thought, maybe I’ll do something completely different to jumpstart my creativity.
I never noticed as it was happening, but looking back over the course of my entire career, I realize now that ALL of my fiction was written during dark times.
I’d once had the rug pulled out from under me
Relationship imploding
Lost my house
Humiliating, devastating
For a year, I did nothing but work on a fantasy novel every day.
I did one of those “close my coaching schedule, take a sabbatical, automate existing content, escape into writing a book”
Writing fiction was my life raft.
In 2019, I sensed a bigger burnout was coming, but I thought I might head it off with a really juicy, super indulgent fiction project.
I decided to try MM Romance.
I’d had 2 listeners who wrote in this genre who knew me through my podcast and approached me about narrating audiobooks for them.
Narrating fiction seemed like maybe too big a challenge.
I’d recorded a series of my own narrative non-fiction/ memoir.
In the back of my mind I thought “I don’t know how confident I am performing another author’s work”…
Maybe I should start with writing some of my own.
My intention for writing in this genre:
— I had been reading it for pleasure for years
— I had author friends in the community
— I’d developed a first person POV writing voice that I was most comfortable with
— I tell stories from my own life experiences
— I like character-driven drama and rom coms
— My ideas suited the genre
— I could write for a large existing audience
When I started the MM Author interview podcast
The pen name — Slade James
I was turning 50
I had been single for 18 years, I hadn’t met my partner yet
I’d felt my way through Shift Your Spirits, trying everything and discovering what worked for me.
I had a good sense of “if I could build something from the ground up, knowing what I know now, here’s how I would do it…”
Learn from others in that author community
Spotlight them, create a stage for others as well as myself
Let people get to know me,
my voice,
There was so much life and energy in interviewing a new community of authors
Going to conferences with a completely different group of people
Feeling at home in a queer-friendly community
I was never in the closet in my work, but I wanted to invest in a creative project where I could be as gay as I wanted to be and it be an **asset**.
It worked for a while.
It was a huge hit of dopamine.
It made everything feel new again.
I thought this new creative area would save me.
Then COVID hit.
The uncertainty
The lockdowns
The anxiety
The isolation
The trauma and grief of
Family members getting sick and dying
The collective grief of the people we were losing all over the world
Not to mention recovering from the illness itself—weeks of fatigue, brain fog
None of us was prepared for how to navigate any of that and I think we’re all walking wounded to this day wondering what the hell just happened.
So many parts of my life evaporated (as I’m sure yours did)
My clients were pulling back
Everybody was going into austerity mode, unwilling to pay for non-essentials, especially in support of something that might be a side hustle or passion project.
My base level passive income through Patreon shrank in a single week.
There was a 3 day period where hundreds of people canceled.
Years worth of building that, gone in hours
I started experiencing debilitating insomnia
So bad that I couldn’t function
I said Fuck it.
I’m just going to polish up this MM Romance book and publish it, and if that’s the only thing I do this year, so be it.
I barely got Grumpy Bear out of me, I was already deep in burnout.
If I hadn’t already had about 90% of it done, I don’t know if I would have ever finished it.
But the beta reader feedback was super positive.
My editor was into it.
My author friends were all thumbs up.
The little boost that came from that convinced me that maybe I had built a fiction life raft just in time.
Grumpy Bear was edited and proofed and ready for publication about 7 months before I released it.
The formatting, the publishing, the marketing — all that stuff I had a system for.
I liked doing all that.
It requires a different kind of creativity.
It uses a different part of my brain.
And it had been my job for a long time.
If you’re any kind of creator, then you’re essentially a content marketer.
I needed 7 months to crawl through the motions of a book launch.
I dipped deep into the creative well to write a prequel that I could use for promo and marketing.
I had to build an audience from 0.
You may know that story as “The Uncut Wood.”
It took me three months to write.
Up until that time, it was one of the most challenging projects to finish.
It was HARD.
A 12,000 word story should not be THAT hard.
Jumping ahead to Jan 2021…
Grumpy Bear was — for me, as a fiction author — a hit.
It went to #2 in Gay Fiction a day after it was released.
No. 634 in the whole Kindle Store.
Top 10 and Top 1000 on a debut novel in a new genre with a new identity…
I was over the moon.
For about a week there, I was anesthetized.
High as a kite.
And then I had nothing.
That well was dry too.
Everyone experiences some kind of post-release slump or maybe even a mini collapse.
But Most writers I know would have been deep into Book 2, with a rocket under their ass.
I came down to the reality that I could no longer ignore.
I was burnt out.
Not mini burnout, not blocked…
Burnt out. Capital B.
While the whole world was grieving and anxious and shut in,
I shut down.
I had this perceived pressure that I was supposed to bounce back
Snap out of it
Get on with it
“Butt in chair.”
Y’all, that expression TRIGGERS me.
The shame over not being able to do that… Ugh.
Did I jump at the chance to do a Reboot practice?
No.
Because that’s the messed up thing about any manifestation of depression. What you intellectually know you should do to take action versus what you feel and what you’re able to execute...
They can be worlds apart.
I waited months and months and months.
I languished in a hell of insomnia for almost a year.
After researching and experimenting with every known sleep hygiene protocol known to man — seriously, I could have written a dissertation on sleep hygiene, natural remedies, everything you can think of… Not to mention, my partner runs an apothecary and has access to literally Everything.
Eventually, long story short, I gave in and asked my doctor to prescribe sleep meds.
It worked.
I was slowly able to function again.
Only, now, I was dealing with the adjustment to sedatives, the daily hangovers that go along with that.
And… sedated me is the opposite of prolific.
I mean, my process was already slow and laborious and entrenched since college in the church of MFA literary fiction.
I spent decades discovering my own process.
I’m not a a rapid release fiction author.
Never thought I was.
Never intended to be.
BUT
This was next level — on every level — SLOW.
But sleeping again allowed me just enough energy to start a Reboot.
I did it partly because I needed some way to burn off the fog of the medication.
I clung to it.
I had faith in it because I had to have faith in it.
It had to work.
It had worked for me in the past.
It had worked for hundreds of clients I’d advised.
It too was a looooong slow process.
I should note, that, like most people in the US, I could only access 3 sessions of mental health care. And two of those were eaten up with an assessment.
So, the Reboot is was.
I started walking 3 miles every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, rain or shine, sweaty hot or freezing cold… Wind, hail, sleet, snow. Beyond the health benefits, it’s crucial to get out of the house, particularly if you work from home and would otherwise spend day after day in the same physical space.
I treated the Reboot like my job.
The recovery itself has to be prioritized over other kinds of work.
I stopped pushing myself to write Book 2.
I simply journaled every day.
Writers need to write.
If we’re not writing, we’re digging ourselves deeper.
If I could have given up writing, trust me, I would have.
There were times when I prayed for the desire to do this — the calling — be taken away from me.
Just take it.
Let me not need to do this.
Please.
While it may seem counterintuitive, but writing every day, even if it's just a few hundred words about your thoughts and feelings, can definitely help you overcome burnout.
Not working on your next release.
Proprioceptive writing.
Free writing.
At the very least,
Write something you’re not “supposed” to. For the sheer love of it.
When writing is a hobby, it’s driven by the love of it. When it becomes work, you’re more susceptible to burnout. Working on a story of the heart — without worrying about the market, or your brand, what anyone else expects of you, or what anyone else will say about it, you can reconnect with some of the passion for writing that fills your well instead of draining it.
About halfway through year 2, I attempted a “side project.”
Something related to my series, but not something I ever had to share with anyone or publish.
A little experiment, just to test my muscles and move the gears again.
Readers tend to grumble that short stories aren’t long enough, and don’t have enough character development… I’ve always been influenced the stream of consciousness fiction of the early twentieth century. The compression of time and thought, the lifetimes of memory that can occur in a simple present moment. I wanted to portray 20 years worth of relationship’s history in a single evening.
That story became “The Cubby Hole.”
It’s probably one of my favorite pieces of fiction I’ve ever written.
And at the time it felt like it saved me.
But it was written in burnout.
It was written in pain.
It took me 3 months, again, to write a short story.
But it was good.
And I mean that objectively… the meds had slowed me down, but they hadn’t scrambled my mind.
I was able to produce the work at the quality I intended.
My editor didn’t ask “What the hell is this? What has happened to you?”
It just took a long time.
At some point, I really want to talk about our obsession with always trying to write FASTER — save it for another episode.
And it did prove to me that my magic wasn’t lost forever.
I wrote another short this way — The Day Pass
It was really short, and feeling a little more confident, I wrote it quickly.
In year 3 of my burnout —
With not much income to show, other than what was left of the passive income streams I’d built over two decades and the clients who still sought me out for sessions, and the savings I’d banked for years in vague fear of something like this happening
With no new fiction published, no more author interview episodes produced
I won’t even go into watching all my friends churning out books. We’ll save comparisonitis for its own episode.
It became critical to prove to myself I could finish the full length Bear Camp Book 2 that I was *supposed* to write.
Readers and fans asked about it because they were excited for it and they wanted it… I felt like such an absolute failure and a fraud that I couldn’t deliver.
To anyone who’s not a writer, this sounds like the most pathetic navel gazing entitled madness they’ve ever heard in their life, but if you’re a writer and you’ve ever been in this place (or your own personal version of this limbo/ purgatory/ hell) you know…
So I wrote Muscle Cub — like the others — in burnout.
But here’s the thing — I cancelled the deadlines I had related to that book — this was probably the hardest thing to do. It felt like admitting defeat. I was afraid that I’d never be able to get back on my editor’s schedule again… I was afraid people wouldn’t want to work with me again in the future because it was unprofessional, because I didn’t have my shit together… Of course, she said NONE of the judgmental things I was saying to myself. The exact opposite. She was very supportive, understanding, and encouraging.
I don’t think I realized how much pressure would be relieved by releasing the deadlines until after that conversation. It was one of the single most impactful actions I took to help myself recover.
I logged all my progress, but I didn’t worry about any particular word count per day or any certain number of chapters per week.
I didn’t adhere to a calendar of goals floating outside and above the circumstances of my reality.
I low-balled everything I would normally do — I didn’t set up a certain amount of work per session and then try to push for MORE.
I know it’s expected for people to push, especially toward the end of a project.
I took my usual number of work hours and I subtracted from it. I used a quote-unquote “bad” day of progress as a metric instead of the unicorns I’d been magically capable of on the best days.
I gave myself strict cut-off times.
I scheduled days off where I didn’t even think about writing.
My objective was as much grace and space as possible, and let the story reveal itself to me in its own time.
At a pace my brain and spirit could handle.
Which is not what I wanted it to be. But it was what I needed.
It wasn’t the optimal way of finishing a book, according to what was “normal” for me, and certainly not according to any online writing community advice.
It was as hard to ignore all those voices as it was to do the writing.
But I wasn’t running a marathon or doing sprints.
I was walking wounded.
I had to implement gentler strategies that honored my health.
I still don’t want to admit that I burned out.
The story I’m telling you… embarrasses me.
I think I’m telling you this BECAUSE I need to make the shame go away, I need it to become something else,
I need to transmute it into a form where it can help someone else.
Make it something with practical value in the world for someone other than just me.
That’s what my entire non-fiction career has been based around.
Shift You Spirits wasn’t just a brand name, it was always an epic ongoing Note to Self.
I’m not trying to record a definitive lecture on healing from burnout in a single episode.
I’m personally RECOVERING from burnout — present tense. It’s not entirely over. I would like to talk about it more in the future — what I’m trying, what’s working for me, what might work for you…
This podcast is part of that.
If it resonates with you, please let me know.
if you can’t access therapy, or you don’t want to…
Or even if you do seek professional guidance —
the Reboot is gentle, positive, and proactive.
I’m not a psychotherapist, but I don’t think any would argue against it.
It definitely won’t hurt.
It may be hard to do, but it’s simple.
Doing nothing is harder.
Taking on the work of change is scary.
Everything you want is on the other side of fear.
The way out is through.
Maybe you’re waiting on a plan of some kind.
Anything.
Something you haven’t tried yet, or something you know you could try again.
What have you tried?
What has worked for you?
Maybe you’re waiting on a sign that it’s time to start.
You don’t have to believe in synchronicities or divine messages.
You could just choose to **make** this your moment to start.
You could just take this as your cue
because it’s good as any other.
... and doing nothing is harder
More details about the Reboot coming soon…