I Am Between Two Worlds

Creative writing and the decision to unsubscribe from myself

It's difficult to know where I am or what to do now that I’m here. I've been silent lately. Silent in this newsletter and pretty silent in my physical life too.

About a month ago, I finished a novel (finished to the degree that I've been showing it to people, anyway). The process, as I've told people, left me feeling changed. I feel like a different person than I did, say, two months earlier.

I'm still in that foggy space between two worlds, perhaps between two lives.

On one hand, I am liberated. I feel free from some part of my past that I'm well rid of. And I'm feeling free to move into some new epoch of whatever life I have left.

The big problem with this development is that I have no idea where to go next. I’m barely sure I know who I am.

I would like to try and have the novel published. I still like it and I think it actually has something useful to say about the world it depicts. It would be nice if people could read it and love it, hate it, or feel absolutely nothing about it. But I understand the math. The odds are vanishingly small that I'll ever get it in print. And even if that miracle happens, it's unlikely that very many people will even read it.

I am alright with this, I think. Honestly. I'm happy in my job, if a little lonely in my life -- a state that's increasingly common for men my age right now.

But still, I did find the writing of the thing to be gratifying. So I think I want to continue that. Even if it's just for me. What better use of a lonely person’s time?

But what of this newsletter? What's the point of it now? I don’t believe I have any wisdom to contribute to the Substackaverse.

One dear person who read my novel was my grad school mentor and dissertation advisor, who sacrificed precious time from her retirement to read it. She liked it, she said. But then she hit me with a difficult question:

After reading the book, she came to the conclusion that I should be doing that kind of work (in addition to teaching of course). She referenced something from one of Frost's letters. She asked me if this newsletter, this "unsubscribe" thing she called it (a hilarious riff on its title, UnTaking -- I laughed for hours at that). She asked me: Is this kind of writing a distraction from work that is truly valuable for me? Not valuable in a career sense, mind you; I know where I stand there and am fine with it. But valuable in the sense of where I'm spending my energies. Writing fiction for the sake of writing fiction, because it is better for me than writing these essays.

I first responded with assurances that I've put this newsletter in its proper place. But here I sit after a few weeks of having produced nothing new for the newsletter. Was she right? Is whatever little kind of therapy session I hold for myself here a worthy use of my thinking and typing?

The worrisome part of all this for me shows up when I consider where my writing energies are going. I have not replaced my silence here with new fiction (aside from some notetaking for a new novel).

No, the only documents I've been producing have been business documents aimed at trying to get the dang book published. There's a sickening irony here, I think: trying to get someone to read my fiction is keeping me from making new fiction.

The query letter was a horrible mountain to climb. And now that I've done that, I realized I hadn't written a 1-page synopsis for the remote possibility that the shitty query letter excites someone to delve further. And so it goes.

What I'm saying is, I'm not sure what to do now that I'm in this liminal in-between. It's a weird space living between two worlds. What’s even the point of my Substack?

Until I come to some next step, I do believe that I will be writing my way through my frustration about writing my way through the neverland I find myself in. In short, this may get obnoxiously meta. And possibly knee-deep in writing nuts and bolts.

I will certainly not be surprised if my subscriber numbers fall while I figure this all out. I can't imagine that me writing about the difficulty of crafting query letters and synopses will be "must see tv." But this is where I'm at and perhaps me working through some of this in public can help me and hopefully other people too. Would love your thoughts here.