On Creative Burnout

I’d felt creative burnout before, but never like this. Never the feeling of mental exhaustion and absolute doneness that I’ve had since around October.

It’s definitely Golemancer that I’ve burned out on; turns out posting chapters daily for almost 3 months and the story falling way short of expectations can hurt. But it’s not just Golemancer; it’s practically anything creative at all that my brain’s just been annoyed to think about the past few months.

I haven’t written any decent blog posts since mid-October except the Katalepsis review, which admittedly was pretty awesome actually. I haven’t written any Systemless even though that series is always fun to make. It’s been hard for me to even plot out stories and plan characters, something I usually love to do in my spare time. I haven’t been able to make progress in editing any of my books for later ebook releases. And it’s even impacted my ability to write papers for my graduate school applications.

In short, wow, I really overdid it for a while and I’m paying the price with Creative Burnout. I really recommend you don’t do this, if you’re a creative type, because it can come back to haunt you.

For over 3 years, I overworked myself in a huge way. I launched four web novels, plus The Gay Gatsby, and those total to be something like 3,300 pages of content. It’s not THAT big compared to other web serial authors. Except that the authors who write that big are usually full-time. I’ve been working a completely separate job, plus writing… just, a lot.

I went back and calculated it; I wrote over 380,000 words of story and blog content in 2021, across ten different projects. But that’s not all; I also outlined something like 5 different story projects, all of which fell through for one reason or another, and most of which will never see the light of day. That’s really, really big! But… it’s also TOO MUCH honestly. Too many projects, too much time I could have spent with friends or studying or just relaxing.

And so it was pretty much inevitable that I’d end up in creative burnout; it was only a matter of when. And that when came very quickly once Golemancer didn’t meet my way-too-high expectations.

For 2022, my only New Year’s Resolution is to take it easier, to focus on a couple projects that really mean something to me. To refind that spark that makes writing fun. To just enjoy writing without the massive pressure behind some nebulous career-making goal.

That is, unless I really need the money. But if that happens, you’ll know because I’ll be posting way more fictions than I currently do lol.