It’s not done. Probably it will still get done, but progress has not been good.

I appreciate everyone’s patience, but at this point this is a professional failure on my part. It’s taken longer to write (to fail to write!) book 4 than to write all three prior novels in the series. That’s not okay.

Thoughts on why. In short: my life is much better and my feelings about being a writer are much worse.

1. Life

When I wrote the first three Baru novels I was to varying degrees poor and miserable. I lived in collapsing, mushroom-ceilinged, roach-infested housing. I had no full time income or (after burning out hard after six months of intense crunch on a video game gig) any prospects for a career. My feelings about my own writing were deeply negative. I sought out the harshest criticism I could find and measured my work against it. I deleted millions (!) of words of writing—several novels worth. The worst part is that this writing genuinely wasn’t very good! I wasn’t just being neurotic, it was actually failed work.

I am now much happier. I have a pleasant apartment, two wonderful cats, a full-time job on a successful project (we’ve sold millions of copies of Subnautica 2 in our first few weeks) and I am tolerably medicated. I have air conditioning and nothing crawls into my coffee to die! Despite the whole world, if I lie down on the couch and do nothing, most days I feel content. Anyone who’s wrestled with depression or the ‘call of the void’ knows what a relief this is.

(On bad days when I do feel depressive I find there’s something soothingly numb about it—you have no choice but to burrow, eat a ton of carbs and rot. I don’t know if this is an adaptive response to depression, or the point of depression itself, to force you into shelter and passivity the way a cat is forced by its evolution to nap 18 hours a day.)

I don’t think this improvement has ‘cost me my edge’. Being poor sucks. Living in misery and filth wastes a lot of time—when your radiator starts geysering black water everywhere, you stop making progress on your rough draft. My material conditions are a lot better, and so are my mental conditions. Contentment is an intrinsic good…but I can’t deny that in this case it is probably getting in the way of the extrinsic good of writing y’all a novel.

I spend a lot of time on things—games, cooking, friends, games with friends—that I only do for short term happiness. Objectively, I could spend some more of this time writing, or thinking about writing. Just an hour a day would be enough to finish the book in a few months. Yet I don’t buckle down and do it. Why? After years of teaching myself to be okay with non-productivity while too sick to work, I am now okay with non-productivity even when I’m able!

Which is its own problem:

2. Brain

Like most of us these days, I struggle to focus. I use a range of internet blockers and host file edits when I need to try for deep concentration. But even after quitting social media, the basic operant conditioning of “work for thirty seconds, then check for interesting notifications” is still twisted into my brain’s reward systems. Even when I have a blocker turned on, I’ll often find myself opening new tabs and checking websites I can’t even see! Like a penguin pecking a button for food pellets. Ironically, I work best with some kind of constant stimulation going, like very loud music or a TV series I’ve seen before.

I have looked at treatment for ADHD and even tried some empirical approaches like neurofeedback, which I unfortunately couldn’t afford to continue. Drugs are an option I haven’t explored yet.

I worry that the processes in my brain which used to ‘work on writing’ even while I wasn’t writing have been hijacked. I need to cultivate them, but it’s not easy when there’s so much to scroll or listen to.

Tabbed browsing and smartphone internet browsers were a mistake! This book would be done by now if I had to get online by dial-up.

3. Being a writer

My relationship to writing and other writers has changed a lot since the first Baru novel came out ten years ago. I had a community of writers I knew and exchanged critiques with, and I was in contact with a larger professional sphere—one that was obviously an embarrassing mess, but which, for a young writer, still felt like a place to meet peers (many of whom I am very fond of and remain in occasional touch with).

I felt that if I kept writing, I would find more connection. What I put out in the world would return to me in a positive way. If I met someone new in the writing world, I could be proud of my own work and excited to meet them as a peer.

Those feelings have changed. My interactions with the broader writing community have been really tough on me. The details aren’t important, but the upshot is that I now hope my writing won’t attract attention, and that if it does, I won’t have to see it. I go to professional events only to see friends from far away, and I don’t share my writing with any kind of circle or community as I work. Even my editor and agent rarely hear from me (sorry!)

This is a very different brainspace to write in. There’s a big motivational gap between “I can’t wait for people to read this!” and “I hope I won’t read anything about me that makes me want to kill myself.”

I have done the most fun writing of my life while in constant day-to-day contact with a small community, whether that’s a forum where I’m writing fanfiction, bouncing chapters off friends, an email chain with creatives who’ve hired me to work on their IP, or a coffee shop where the waiters get to know me and ask how things are going. I don’t work well alone. But when it comes to Baru 4, I am generally working alone. And my work has suffered for it: I think all three of my last novels had major structural issues and poor discipline, which led to bloated wordcounts.

The moments of biggest progress on Baru 4 have come from that most writerly form of socialization: reading a book that inspired me and applying its lessons to my own work.

4. In conclusion

I still think Baru 4 will get done. I have been working on it, I’ve known all along broadly what needs to happen, and I’ve done a lot of other work along the way — a novel, several games. But it has been too long since I promised to deliver this book and that’s on me.

Part of it is that I now see attention from other writers and fans as something I want to avoid. Part of it is that, with a decent life and steady medication, I no longer feel the extremes of strong emotion that can push a writer to the page. (On the other hand, I no longer spend years in a depressive funk, either.) Part of it is that I’ve probably become too sophisticated and jaded about my own work, too able to see all the ways it falls short. It’s easier to charge forward with a draft when you haven’t learned to sneer at yourself.

I don’t know how to fix all this but I suspect it will happen the way it always happens: at some point I will sit down and write the fucking thing, and when I get 100,000 words in, I won’t hate it so much I have to throw it out.

I felt like I owed everyone some kind of explanation and update. I’m really sorry this has taken so long. I have no good excuse, because I could have finished by now if I’d just sat down and done it. I’ve just allowed myself to sink into solitary contentedness. Which is nice, but not enough for a writer on a contract.

Thanks for bearing with me.