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I've always thought of myself as something of a rootless person.

When I was younger, my surroundings were too precarious and often times quietly cruel for me to "love my country" like my nationalist parents wanted me to. When we immigrated to the USA, my father would frequently cry when confronted with signifiers of our old life-- food, or artwork, or music from our culture-- and I never really cared. I didn't care about the USA either. I never developed a relationship that nourished me with any land I stood on. I didn't really understand what I had in my home country until I lost it-- but it's not like I yearn to return to it now that I have the potential and opportunity to do so. I consider myself more of a citizen of the "world at large" than any one country, regardless of what the papers say.

After all if you don't love anything it's kind of psychologically the same as just liking whatever.

I wrote a web novel, The Solstice War, from 2013 to 2019. Six years is a long time to be writing anything, but I feel like I did not get much done in that timespan. I'm not going to go find the size of volumes 1 and 2 of The Solstice War, nor will I aggregate Volume 3 and the Salva Sidestory into it-- it's enough to just sit with the feeling that I wasn't satisfied and that I wanted to stop. Looking back on it, I think the feeling was somewhat premature. You see, I've recently felt very similarly about Unjust Depths. I've felt that I want to just quit it, to kick sand in the eyes of my "fans" for no particular reason, and to live out a life devoid of any artistic value. In my worst moments, I feel cursed to live a half life even in my creative space. I have no homeland, I have no race, I have no language-- I am always between two things that are cast in cultural opposition. In this sense, I've also found myself cursed to be "successful" (many people who I deeply respect as creative people think my creative work is good and meaningful and I have some vocal fans who swear at their trans woman meetups that my work is good) and also a "failure" (my audience is nearly nonexistent and I've made no money in all my years of writing it and I also recently tanked all of my limited social media clout).

In my worst moments, I wish I'd never started writing-- that I'd just entertained stories as unknowable objects rather than being so obsessed with making them my own.

Recently I closed all my public social media, and publically announced there's no more deadlines-- and honestly that's done wonders to my relationship to Unjust Depths.

I think one of the mistakes I made with The Solstice War was not leaving social media sooner. I think the pressures and friction that I felt toward The Solstice War were just part of being in conversation about it with a public presence, trying to "market it" and "gain an audience." Had I stopped all of that, I could have taken a break, let my feelings sit, and maybe gone back to writing it. I could have repaired my relationship to it-- but then again, Unjust Depths would have never happened in this realm of imagination, so maybe it was for the best.

With Unjust Depths, I've had some dark moments of evaluation the past few months-- but I do feel my relationship to it slowly repairing itself.

(For those tuned into UnDe news I am moving across the country soon and haven't been in a good mood to write. I have some outlined Gertrudemas stuff I want to do in December.)

I have an ethos of not asking for money for my work. First of all, I just don't want anyone's money. I don't want to be responsible for it-- I don't want to say to someone that my work was worth the opportunity cost of food or clothing or whatever. I don't care if the people who purchase my stuff have means-- I simply don't like the idea period. Secondly, if only people who bought my work could read it, I wager many less of the people who have read Unjust Depths would have done so. Either because they couldn't afford to buy a book instead of other things, or they would not have wanted to. A lot of people regard charging money for indie writing to be farcical, which I disagree with. Work is work, and creative work is valuable-- but writing is severely devalued.

(I have a tip jar because some people were literally begging to give me *something* in return. But I don't *ask* for money and those people don't get anything in return.)

However, it is only recently that I've begun extending that ethos from "nonpayment" to "noncommercialization" more broadly. If I'm not charging money for it, I have a different relationship to my readers than other web serial authors, with patreons and kindle collections and so on. I don't have to keep a deadline-- if you want to stop reading because I haven't updated in a few months to focus on me, you can do that. You haven't bought a product-- you had an experience, it may have been a positive one or a negative one, but there is no commercial relationship between us. You invested time, I suppose, but if we were going to take everyone to task for that we would have utter chaos in the world. In addition, I don't have to market. I don't have to become part of the product-- in the current era of the internet, personalities are always so intertwined with the things they make, and I don't have to do this. I don't have to talk to anyone, I don't have to be on public platforms, I don't have to "engage" with my "community" (fandom) as the parlance so often goes. I'm not selling anything, so I don't need to market it or myself.

I've got my day job that I work to sustain myself. When I write, I should write out of a desire to express myself, rather than an obligation to create product. I want to create art-- I've always wanted to create art. I've always wanted to write about things meaningful and exciting and interesting to me. I will continue to do this in some form or another.

In my mind, I still had this idea that being a "hobbyist" was to be lesser-than what I "ought" to be-- but maybe it is exactly what I am and that is perfectly fine.

Ultimately, The Solstice War had become product to me, and I was unable to sustain it. Unjust Depths almost became product to me as well.

I took some steps that for me, are radical. However, I think they have had positive outcomes for me, even if not for like, my most die-hard fans I suppose.

One of the positive things about this has been that I can look at my outline for "book 2" of Unjust Depths and-- first of all, I want to stop thinking of it the same way I have been. I want to include all the kinds of stories I decided not to write before because "I need to finish this". Since I don't care if Unjust Depths is finished, I can write the story of resistance to the Volkisch with all of the detail and richness I wanted, rather than "truncating" the events to "get out a book 2"-- do you care more about a "completed" story or do you want to experience everything I want to play around with? You can make that decision for yourself. I've made my own decision. This is no longer a "book" to me, it is, as they've been called but not treated as, "The Anthology of Unjust Depths"-- and I want this Anthology to include many different episodes about the world, the characters, their struggle and dreams.

Secondly, because there's no deadline, I can sit with the things I'm writing and make chapters as long or short as I want to. I am thinking for the next part of the story there will be more variability in the length of the chapters. Some will be long intricate multi-parts like is the norm now, but I also want to be able to do some shorter and tighter character stories that focus in one aspect or event. Kind of an influence from watching a lot of Star Trek lately I suppose. I am also going to eventually abandon "Sunday, 4 PM CST". This is the last vestige of "pro web novel marketing advice" that is left in my workflow. I am eventually going to introduce chaos and indifference to this element as well.

In a week, I'll be leaving another city behind. I feel conflicted about all that I've left "unfinished" in my life. I feel like probably most people at this stage don't respect me, don't think I'm "capable" of anything anymore. But I'd rather reinvent myself daily or weekly or yearly than struggle more than I have to for "consistency." I struggle enough as it is.

I would love to "finish" Unjust Depths. Maybe in 10 years or so? If we still have a planet then and I am alive in it. I don't know.

In the meantime, what I would love to do is tell the stories I want to, how I want to, when I want to, contemptuous of the pressures of "productivity" and "success".