Balancing

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word…

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Like almost everyone a year into the pandemic, I find myself thinking ‘I want my life back.”

I’ve slowly realized, though, that for me this isn’t only about the restrictions of the pandemic. Sure, I miss eating out, and movies, and meeting friends and family. But being a fairly introverted sort, happy with my own company most of the time, those aren’t a huge part of my life. What I’m missing more are the things I used to do, until writing took over my life.

I’ve written four books and a novella in the last five years. (Plus eighty thousand words of a first draft I tossed out completely.) Good books, by their reviews and awards, and not short (except the novella). Plus innumerable blog posts, my own and as a guest; book reviews, articles…sometimes it feels like all I do is write.

I used to have another life.

A life where I could spend four hours birding, and not feel guilty. A life where I didn’t just watch birds, I drew them, turning my work into cards for friends and family.

A life where I could spend hours with Ordnance Survey maps and Google Earth, studying field boundaries and the position of Roman villas, or bronze age barrows, or the remnants of ecclesiastical sites along a river. (And then go out and walk these sites, but that is a pandemic loss, at least this winter.)

A life where I read for pleasure, not for research or review.

This is no one’s doing but my own. I’ve always been immersed in my work, regardless of which of my several careers we’re talking about. I thought, in the first couple of years after I stopped working, I’d found a better balance. Then I slipped back into old habits, in part for the sheer joy of doing what I had always wanted to do, a need and desire that had taken a back seat to work and travel and the other demands and pleasures of life.

I took a day off to go birding this week, down to the shores of Lake Erie to look at waterfowl and early songbird migrants, and when I got home, my fingers itched to draw that flotilla of redhead and scaup dotting the Inner Bay, or the tundra swans passing overhead. I read a book for pleasure, too – Kazuo Ishiguro’s newest, Klara and the Sun. And I thought – why isn’t this my life? No one’s forcing me to write a book a year, to not draw, or not take another landscape history course – no one but myself.

Hindsight tells me why. I’ve wanted to be a writer – a published author – since childhood. The reality of that happening – and happening to critical acclaim, too – was exciting. (It still is.) It’s been exhilarating. But I’m starting to see the cost. Ironically, the things I’ve mostly stopped doing: birding, studying landscape history, reading about deep ecology – are the things that have helped inform the worldbuilding of my books, an aspect of them which is almost universally singled out for praise.

Am I going to stop writing?  Of course not. Writing brings me joy and challenge, and I have my characters’ stories to tell. But after Empire’s Heir comes out later this year, will the next one follow close on its heels?  Maybe not. Perhaps, loyal readers, you’re just going to have to wait a little longer for Druisius’s novella, and the last book in the series, and whatever else appears, asking to be told. But they’ll be better books for it.