Yep, you can probably tell this post will be a cheerful one.
So burnout is something that I think every writer hates to imagine happening to them. Part of it is the fact that any writer who is truly invested in the work they are doing hates to believe that the day will come that they will wake up, look at that wonderful fresh blank screen or that manuscript in slight need of refinement and say "Man I don't have the energy for this today." Another part is the fact that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of advice on how to get over burnout. It's not quite the same thing as writer's block, where you are trying to get past a difficult part of a story or something. It's more a sudden exhaustion of your ability to create things, a fatigue that settles over you and prevents you from going through the whole process of writing, and that is a whole different animal to fight off. There's kind of an impression that makes it seem almost impossible to recover from.
In any case, burnout is probably what I managed to achieve for myself the past few months, and I've been paying the price for it lately. After publishing Murders, I launched into a rewrite of Broken Halo, quickly followed by writing over a hundred thousand words in Eagle's rough draft. At the same time, I was working quite a bit of overtime for my day job, trying to figure out a new career path for myself and my family, moving to a new apartment, and dealing with the everyday chaos that occasionally happens in life. Needless to say, I was a bit overconfident about my ability to handle that much of a workload, and my productivity after that point kind of broke down as I was trying to start a new project.
Since then I've been struggling to recover somewhat, a fact that's been reflected more or less here on my blog. My apologies to the handful of you who were looking for more updates here. I'll skip the stereotypical promise to update more frequently, but I hope that I won't vanish for months again this time. I also hope that no one takes this post as a sign that I am not planning on finishing the series that I've already started. Eagle will come out this year, though likely later than originally planned, as will Broken Halo. Glasswitch and Social Contract might be held off until the following year by necessity, but then again publishing eight or nine novels in two years was a bit ambitious for a part time writer.
In any case, I'm still working along, and hopefully avoiding the burnout this time. I hope all of you are doing well, and I will see you around.
