Update: It’s been brought to my attention (by the half-dozen people who e-mailed me under the impression that I was about to kill myself among others) that this may seem a bit darker than I had intended.
Thank you all for your concern. While I can’t describe myself as exactly happy, I’d like to assure you all that I’m going to be fine. However, I also understand that you’re in need of closure.
Here’s what I’ll do. I’m going to write one last story. Not for another few months. But it will be “The End” of my writing here. When that story is written, Dunce Upon A Time will be complete. I’ve decided I’ll leave it up with just a few nips and tucks. But I’m still going to move onto other things. I need to drastically change my life and that story will have, among other things, my reasons why.
In the mean time, I still care very much about you all. So, I’ll tell you what: if you send an e-mail to dunceuponatime@gmail.com, I’ll e-mail you the next time I do something. See, not gone. Just changed.
If you’ve ever contributed to my website you’re already on that list and you’re still going to get free books equal to whatever amount you donated. They just won’t be BC Woods books. You’re not forgotten.
Thank you all.
Love,
Andrew
Well, this is going to be extremely awkward, so it’s probably best to just come right out and say it.
I haven’t really been happy with my writing or this website for a while now. It started with the big website crash, and then the second one… and the other server catastrophes. Those crashes gave me an opportunity to really examine what it is that I’ve been doing here over a long period of time as I put the website back together piece by piece.
And the answer I came up with was: some small amount of writing, and a whole lot of wasting my life.
The wasting my life bit didn’t always bother me. It’s mine to piss away, after all. But it’s bothering me now because I was surprised to find that I don’t care enough to really knuckle down and fix things here. I’ve simply stopped caring. And as I read over the past few months of posts, it’s extremely obvious to me that I’ve stopped caring.
I could probably continue to phone it in for years. Maybe even until I got some new passion to continue, but why bother? I don’t want to write things that aren’t fun to write and even less fun to read. I think I’m done.
My life in general is probably contributing to this in some regard. Maybe even my diet. Maybe if I ate a really really good sandwich I’d change my mind about all of this. But I still don’t care. Believe me, I scraped the bottom of the “giving a fuck” barrel to see if I could find anything.
I’m exhausted. I feel very old and it’s taking everything I have inside of me just to feel like shit when I get up in the morning. Don’t get me wrong, I try to keep a sense of humor about it, but even when you’re laughing at how fucked up everything is it’s not the same as actually laughing. And you can’t fool people forever.
I’ll probably come out of this eventually, but I’m thinking that’s at least several months if not years away and I don’t feel like pretending in the mean time.
On top of all this, I had an experience recently that reminded me I’m just “Some Guy.” Not the protagonist of a story. Not the center of even my own universe. Just some random guy, like an extra in the background of a movie. And when I had that realization, everything I wrote here about my own life (however screwed up it was) felt like a pathetic cry for attention. I can stand to be silly but I can’t bear to be pathetic.
I’m going to leave my website up for at least the next three months so I can finish honoring the subscriber obligations I currently have. After that I’ll decide what I want to do with the website, as to whether or not I should delete it all so I don’t have to think about it ever again, or leave it up for posterity. I’ll also decide what I want to do with the eBook stuff I have scattered all over the place at that time. To be perfectly frank, I’m thinking that this will all be gone in a few months. Although if you ever do get lonesome for anything I’ve written I’m sure you could find it on the wayback machine or something.
I’m not going to stop writing. I don’t think I could do that if I tried. But I’m probably only going to be submitting things to professional venues under different names than BC Woods from now on, and if it gets rejected (which it probably will) it will stay on my computer forever.
Blah, I hate writing this. Seems so whiny.
As for the Glass Tongue stories, I think those are going on the scrap heap too. I don’t have the energy to deal with everything in my personal life and make those enjoyable. Like I said, I’m just very very tired.
There’s nothing anyone could say that would really change my mind about any of this so I’ve disabled comments, as well as my facebook page and twitter feed. If you really really need to e-mail me (which you probably don’t, not that you’re not important) you can find my e-mail easily enough by browsing the site.
Thank you for your readership. It has meant the world to me.
But I think I’m done now.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
