Yes, yes, I know the usual answer. Writers don’t retire. We die with our hands on the keyboard, mid sentence, probably having just typed in a misplaced comma. But do we really?
Dave Drake retired. I’m not sure why, or how but he did. He said he no longer felt the need to write, so he stopped. And Jerry Pournelle retired, not willingly. He said he still had the stories, he just no longer had the words. This, btw, was what happened to me 15 years ago when my thyroid first went tiltawhirl. (Now at least it seems to be in permanent state of decay. Which is easier to treat than now is fine now is not.)
John Ringo thought he was retiring just… seven? years ago. And while those of us who love reading him hoped he wouldn’t, and were overjoyed when his muse hunted him down and whipped him (eh) into shape again, it was never sure.
This morning we had the talk again. You know, the one that goes “Perhaps it’s time I did something more productive with my life.” It’s the first time we had the talk since I quit trad pub, or it quit me. And it seems like a weird time to do it. Or perhaps the perfect one.
Yes, No Man’s Land did better than I expected. But Witch’s Daughter sank so deep it cratered. Yes, okay, guys, I know, Amazon has been playing stupid games (not just) with (my) reviews and tags and placement and whatever the heck, but even my giving away of earcs to substack subscribers was pathetic. NML gave away around 180 per. Witch’s daughter gave…. thirty? And that’s hard to blame on Amazon.
It kind of cut the ground out from under me, and I’ve been walking into walls since.
Then there was the blog fundraiser. No, not emergency, but crimeny cricket, people. I post every day unless my health is being stupid and requiring me to spend so much time with the doctor we should stop meeting that way. I work till midnight on a normal work day, and get up with the blog hanging over me, if I didn’t do it the night before. I’m haunted by a persistent fear of the blank blog. While at a remote ren faire, helping The Little Pickle, she was in shock of how much I do: blog, and writing and administrivia that must be done every day. She classified it as my having three jobs.
And I realize it wasn’t a fundraiser for need — only to the extent that we’re involved in a complex whole-family maneuver that requires us to get another house which costs more and we kind of counted on my normal minimal income. BUT we can figure that out, and I didn’t want people to hurt themselves — but even so.
Looks at ceiling. Let’s say I had more successful fundraisers BEFORE I had fundraisers. Just people randomly donating when they read something they liked.
And I wondered… I always said I would blog while there was a need. Maybe the need is passing?
We had that talk again today. And for the first time in 41 years Dan didn’t say “don’t.” He didn’t say “Wait.” He did say, somewhat apprehensively “Are you going to be impossible to live with?”
I don’t think I am. Not more impossible than I’ve been the least year at least.
So am I retiring?
I don’t know.
Perhaps I’ve entered the phase of life known as playing footsy with retirement, which can go on for a few months, a few days or in my dad’s case 20 years. (He started at about my age.)
The negatives of retiring are as follows: A life of working on my soul (heaven knows it needs it) and cross stitch sounds very restful, but it might be because I’m so tired. I might be bored. The characters are still in my head, I don’t know if playing with them alone is enough. The blog — aka ATH aka the Hoyt home for wayward minds — is as much my emotional support as anything else. I tend to write the most cheery posts when most depressed. This is not a coincidence. Mostly, though, will the sons and the pickles kill me if I JUST devote myself to being mom and wife and house keeper. At least one of the time I quit writing (for two weeks) the kids forced me to go back to work. (They swear I dusted THEM three times a day. This is nonsense. Once at most. They also say they lived in fear I’d throw one of the cats out for not being clean enough. Again, nonsense. Pixie of blessed memory was never clean. I still loved him.)
The cons are more material: I won’t need to stay up late; I can stop reading politics; I can return to my little private life, my little private way (Oh, the idiot stalker won’t go away, probably, but then again, like death and taxes that’s fixed) and stop the splash back on my family and friends; maybe, finally my house will be relatively clean and not an ever growing mess I don’t have time to deal with. I can perhaps write stuff just because it pleases me. Or not. Because if the dogs liked the food we wouldn’t be where we are.
I’m not going to shutter ATH — or here — tomorrow or next month. Enough people donated, and they donated their usual, that I wouldn’t do that to them.
I’ll keep it up till December at least. And I’m going to try to finish Orphans, though something is broken in it and I’m not sure what. Might be five books at least crammed into one. Or maybe I’ve realized that whole thing is not a series so much as a very long book, which is difficult to impossible to write coherently. Who knows? I’m going to try, anyway.
But the question has been asked and not immediately negated. Do writers retire? Should I?
The best part of hitting your head on a stone wall is the relief when you stop. Should I stop?
Mad Genius Club 
40 responses to “Do Writers Retire?”
Does it have to be all or nothing? Perhaps I’m reading into it, but there seem to be some posts you enjoy far more than others; why not cut back to just those?
I’m always amazed at people who fill their blogs daily, and even multiple times a day, like you and Ace. It would drive me crazy, but people are different and I assume you do it because you enjoy it.
A warning: when I retired, my dad told me that I would lose all of my free time. He was right. There were so many things I thought I’d do “when I have the time”, I don’t have nearly the time to do them all.
For the record, in blogging, yes, it needs to be all or nothing.
If I took the blog to say twice a week, I’d have NO readers. People either do it on the daily or not at all.
And yeah.
As usual, I’m odd. I read the e-mails as I get a chance and respond the same way. This, I freely admit, puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to timely responses.
I’m right there with ya, pal. Life has kept speeding along and I’m slowing down. I get to things when I get to them now instead of right away.
Can confirm; as an erratic blogger whose active audience is mostly a few mutual find-and-follows made here or at ATH. Too much noise on the internet relative to signal.
As usual for the King of Bad Marketng™, I’m lucky to write twice a week on my blog, and that at uneven intervals. I started it 3 years ago, and typically got one or two hits/day. Now I’m up to 12-20 daily. Pathetic numbers by social media standards, but I don’t care. My goal is to mostly put up posts that remain relevant and useful rather than get outdated. Am I succeeding in that? Who knows?
Similarly, my short stories are all over the map from SF, fantasy, horror, to mystery. I have no intention of ever writing a series character or even a series of novels. My goal is not money (not anymore anyway), it’s to leave readers with something to think about and to revisit the characters and their life choices.
I’ll leave all you Huns out there to contemplate my bad choices in life.
There’s a whole lot of distance between “do all the things” and “do none of the things.” Taking a step back and going part-time is also possible. For some people. You, on the other hand, are very much a whole-hearted “must do everything at once” sort of person.
Try taking a couple of months off, and not pressuring yourself? (I know that is the hardest part.)
If I take a couple of months, I might as well shutter the blog. The effect is the same. Even a couple of weeks will kill it. it is what it is.
Human nature. It is what it is, for the very best of us right down to the sodden worst of us. Stocking up on guest posties is a thing, and there may be the inevitable “I HAVE to post THIS or it will eat me” thing.
I’m still trying to bludgeon the writing back into proper order. Fasting helped get my head right, but the stuff I had to drink because “healthy” made me a bit insane, so it was a wash. If you’re on a health kick and suddenly you have “I must smack all stupid people upside the head” thoughts, do not indulge in it even if it seems like a *really* good idea. I’m convinced that stuff made me evil, just a little bit, for a short period of time, but I am much better now. Mayhap not totally sane, but eh. Could be worse.
Not pressuring oneself is a difficult thing when one knows that one is lazy and undisciplined when there is no schedule to keep. Mayhap there will be family things to keep up with. Younger spawnlings may have homes of their own, but they don’t stop being yours even when they have their own.
Don’t. Keep the mind going. Part-time could work, but so could 3/quarter time. Waltz it and don’t Polka.
Should writers retire? Probably. I’ve definitely read authors I once loved where it’s obvious that the muse has gone elsewhere, the gift of words has disappeared, and yet the volumes keep churning out. The Cat Who… books, once we reach the point where the murder is a minor distraction from our main discussion of new shopping opportunities in Moose County, certainly come to mind.
Should you retire now, though, is a very different question. I can’t answer about your specific circumstances or what your body and soul need. All I can say is that, if you did, I would very much miss you, your blog posts, and your books.
My mom is convinced the later books in the series were ghost written.
“I won’t need to stay up late; I can stop reading politics;” Yeah, my poor aunt Salimay!” You can no more stop reading politics than I can stop reading about the Navy. That at least, is in your blood.
V/R William Lehman ________________________________
No idea. If I stop writing, things leak. Day Job and writing are parts of my Vocation, and, well, let’s just say I don’t want to know what the Editor would toss at me if I tried to bail on either/both right now.
You are you. I would suggest not 1) doing anything in a rash rush, and 2) not dusting the cats more than twice a day. Unless they really, really need it. Dusting people, or scrubbing them before they get any farther into the house, is a different story.
I’m sorry Witches Daughter did poorly. It is a wonderful sweet story. This just may not be the season for wonderful sweet stories.
I thought Drake had retired because he could no longer keep track of a full story while writing it?
The other aspect is, I don’t think Drake was someone driven to write by his muse; more a need to make sense of what he’d experienced. I noticed at a certain point, he did that, and seemed to have a period where he wasn’t entirely sure what he was writing about after that for a while.
That is definitely why C.J. Cherryh retired.
*”I tend to write the most cheery posts when most depressed.”*
Thought we weren’t related? Eh. Folks ask me all the time why I’m so happy. Been fighting depression for over forty years. Hasn’t won yet, probably due to stubbornness more than anything.
Retiring is a thing to be feared around here. Every male in both families bar two died quite close to when they retired. Great grandad doesn’t count, because he kept farming until his late 90’s, even though that wasn’t a “job” it was work. I’ll probably never retire and conk out on the job. There’s always something to be done and I don’t know how to put it down yet.
Best case is it comes in waves. Sometimes the writing is like a mudslide: slow but inevitable and impossible to stop once it gets going. Others it’s like late August heat baking the mud into cheap Chinese concrete. Writing gets harder when the mind is fuzzy. No jokes about cats on heads, this is srs bzns.
In any case, sometimes a change is as good as a rest, as they say. But sometimes you need a rest from the change. Take a bit and focus on other things. Sometimes that helps.
Also, and I don’t recommend this, I’ve found that rescuing kittens helps, too. Just don’t go searching for them in your walls.
Yeah, people adapt to situations, and can have problems if they change fast without replacing the emotional investment and activity levels. Now, is definitely not everyone with equal chance.
But there are people it happens with, and there are people it is more likely to happen with.
I did buy Witch’s Daughter. But, that is largely on the strength of being a fairly ‘old’ reader or blog commentator.
I remembered liking the setting, and being a little interested in that and another thing you were working on, when stuff happened and you had to drop stuff mid, and then came back some odd years later.
(I had money, but I have not had time for reading. I basically bought a few things to stick on this machine’s kindle for PC until I either find out about the next windows Kindle App, or until I buy a kindle. Or whatever.)
The marketing for Witch’s Daughter maybe didn’t register.
My feeling is that it is not time to draw conclusions. Weird, surprising maybe sucky year, and also you have your own side of busy.
Anyway, what I am hearing triggers my ‘sounds like a temporary mental state, that is maybe a warning’ instinct. Which thought is very much not definitive or conclusive evidence.
You know what I think.
David ‘retired’ and was back writing what, a year later?
I personally love your work. Should you decide to scale back to the point that you only write when being ridden and flogged by your muse, remember that it is not an obligation to us that you publish your stuff. I can’t speak for the creditors. To quote Dorothy Grant from “Going Ballistic”, “You do ewe.”
*hugs* As far as the blog and the fiction go, maybe it’s best not to make permanent decisions about them until the dust settles on the urgent stuff. *I* would miss your stuff if you retired, but that’s not a reason to refrain from retiring, if you decided that was what you needed to do.
If the retirement was at the end, David Drake had a cognitive decline that prevented noveling, and got physically frail, and then passed away fairly quickly, as I understand it.
It may be that nailing down the timeline would show errors in my recollection.
He was maybe writing weaker novels for a little while, and then may or may not have had some medical stuff tied to the cognition and the frailty. From the frailty to the passing, it feels like it was one year and a half, or so.
Are you maybe thinking of someone else?
Can a writer “retire”?
I’m not a writer by profession, although I’ve done my share of writing over the decades. I am one who keeps some skin in the game by tutoring in the subjects that I love (chemistry, math, and for special requests, I’ll do physicss). My wife kids me that I will probaby never truly retire, because I enjoy what I am doing too much. Sure the extra chunks of change are nice, but even in my late 60s I’m still not spending as much as I make, and that doesn’t include the IRAs we’re going to have to start withdrawing from soon. We do, however,travel more and worry less.
COULD I ever truly retire? Um, maybe, but I doubt it. My muse isn’t one who drives me to write novels or create musical scores, but she drives me just the same. I think your muse would be trading notes with John Ringo’s muse on how to kick you back into creating before very long. A break from deadlines would probably help get some of those nagging life issues cleaned up, but could you stop writing? When water stops being wet, perhaps, but not before then.
Writing IS my retirement. Retired almost 4 years ago and began trying to rebuild a writing “career”.
Unlike many writers among the Huns, I enjoy and feed on Cons like a vampire at a sleeveless-gown ball. I guess somewhere I became a raging extrovert. Anybody who knew me growing up would be totally shocked. Maybe I just didn’t have enough to say back then. Now, nobody can shut me up. I blame…. Actually, I have no frickin idea who or what to blame. Maybe I should blame myself. Nah, not going there. <Puts on happy face :)>
On a completely unrelated note, Anthropic tells EU: “This scene is now ready, please go away.” 😉 https://www.politico.eu/article/anthropic-european-parliament-donny-greenberg-artificial-intelligence-ai/
I hope you don’t stop, mostly for selfish reasons. But also because I hope you’re not at a point where you really need to.
As to Witch’s Daughter: well, it’s a much simpler story than Witchfinder, but the ending knocked it out of the park–and clear across the river. Maybe the problem is that there are several other books with that title? Though NML has that problem as well.
Maybe finish the “minor” stories and come back to Orphans after that break?
Heinlein claimed he retired once. He had to start writing again due to internal pressure — he couldn’t NOT write.
But if you do, please finish the Dyce Dare stories. Please!
I figured out what was eating at me. I’m not retiring. I’m supposed to push on the fiction more. So, my assistant will be taking some of the blog donkeywork. (Poor woman. But she DID volunteer.)
Having a few people you can count on for a guest post once or twice a week, irregularly, might also help?
It very much would, yes.
This is my plan, too. There was a brief job scare that kicked me into gear. It’s all very well and good to have some story ideas and think to one’s self, “I’ll write the books when I retire.” It’s another entirely to figure out if I can actually write a book – and all the ancillary stuff around it. No reason to list of any of it here; y’all know.
I picked something that interested me and (probably) has almost no market just to see if it were possible. First books aren’t usually any good, anyway. It seems very bursty. Some days pages pour out. Some days I get stuck.
My blog is nothing like yours (or this one). Mine is more or less a personal journal. My vast internet audience is four or five people (judging by “like” counts). I don’t expect much more because I’m just not that interesting – and, as you say, I don’t post every day.
I’m practicing at your career as a hobby. That’s a very different thing.
Only you can decide if it’s worth the effort. I would miss your books, but I would miss your blog a lot more. That’s probably the opposite of what you would hope for, sorry.
Meh. I haven’t pushed on the fiction as much as I should last fifteen years. Cracks knuckles. Time to.
I would honestly be devastated if you were to disappear.
BUT – whether you should retire or stay around is not a question for me. It is a question for YOU. Somewhat less of a question for Dan (who I presume has the words “for better and for worse” in his contract). A bit less for the boys and the pickles, who want to be able to visit as often as possible.
Are you someone able to stop following the politics? I’m not – it has taken hard training to only follow those who distill down the TLDR into reasonably sized chunks.
Can you stop putting your thoughts and characters into the keyboard? Not me, either. I’m a “Heinlein” writer, who starts to come completely unhinged without my regular fix.
So, “retirement” (the second one) isn’t even a question for me; the only answer is when they pry my cold, dead hands off of the home keys. But, as is true in everything, YOUR mileage will almost certainly vary.
A USAIN is always their own person, different and unique even from other USAINS. Whatever you decide – may you be happy and fulfilled in the future.
I think I just need to concentrate on the fiction. BUT the blog isn’t going away. My assistant is taking a couple of days, which is enough to make it manageable.
Ah, good. Let Holly know that I much enjoy her posts, too!
(She also does an admirable job of reassuring me that “Sarah’s not dead” when you get tied up in the thousand other things you do.)
Why are you posting a photo of Patrick for this article? Did he do something to you?
I love reading your stuff, I just run out of time. Being selfish, I don’t want you to stop. But you need to take care of yourself first, your family next, and then us rabid shifters and dragons.
I still remember picking up the newspaper, remembering this would be the day of the last Peanuts strip, and looking at the headline.