Burnout
Waving the White Flag
I started the May Post-A-Day challenge with the best of intentions. Making a daily post along with my other weekly writing commitments sounded tough, but by the second week I had something of a system going. I could write a daily entry on Medium and still manage my other work.
I didn’t take into account that the third week in May was going to be crazy busy. There were two different online pitch contests I wanted to enter. While one contest was a quick “submit your pitch to an agent and wait” deal, the other one was #PitDark, a Twitter pitch party especially for novels with a dark tone or subject matter. This party allowed you to post a Tweet about the same novel every hour for twelve hours in the hopes of attracting agent interest.
I didn’t have to Tweet every hour. But agents who represent horror aren’t the easiest to come by, and I wanted to maximize my chances of being noticed. As Twitter won’t let you post identical Tweets and because I wanted to keep playing with the wording of the Tweets to see what, if anything, attracted agent notice, this ended up being an all-day haul for me.
On top of that, I had my weekly writing commitments AND two looming contest deadlines.
I gave myself a break on Thursday to tend to #PitDark and complete a story for a writing challenge. But by Friday morning, I couldn’t bear the thought of writing another word. I collapsed on the sofa and watched the Game Show Network; I tried to nap, but my brain continued chewing over queries and revisions and deadlines. I haven’t felt this burned out on writing in a long time, and I didn’t like it.
So I’m going to ease up on the challenge. If I have something to say and a piece ready to go, I’ll get it up there, but I’m not going to force it, especially not if deadlines are looming. I don’t like feeling like a quitter, but that feeling I had on Friday morning of never wanting to write another word scared me a lot more.
(But do I learn? Of course not. I was looking at Twitter tonight and saw information about a daily flash fiction challenge coming up in June and thought “Oh, hey, I could do th — SELF, WHAT DID WE LITERALLY JUST DECIDE ABOUT DAILY CHALLENGES THIS MONTH?” Sigh.)
Although I am stepping back from the May post-a-day challenge, I’d still ❤ a recommend heart if you enjoyed this. You can find a listing of my fiction on Medium here, and I blog occasionally over at my personal website.
