![]() but my mother was still alive, and meanwhile I had a new and wholly unexpected book with the working title "Lost Boys". Therapy writing, in other words.įast-forward to March 2019 and, to nobody's surprise, "Invisible Sun" and "Ghost Engine" weren't going anywhere. So I gave myself permission to go off-track and write whatever I felt like, in the hope that not having a deadline would give me room to at least write something, even if it was unsalable. Also: I knew for a certainty that my mother was going to die at some point in the next couple of months, and it would poison whatever book I was working on at the time, all over again. Even if you're not a front-line carer, dealing with a terminal illness in the immediate family is immensely draining. But not only was I burned out: I was spending about a third of my time traveling to and from the nursing home (and recovering from the visits). While this was happening I should have been working on "Invisible Sun" or "Ghost Engine", both of which were scheduled and already way overdue. Then my mother had two (or maybe three) strokes and went into hospital for three months, followed by most of a year hanging on in a specialist nursing home. It was clearly time for another sabbatical, so I asked for a revised deadline and then took six months off. And then I really burned out, and botched the third re-write of "Invisible Sun" so badly I came down with a case of writers' block. (To this day, "Ghost Engine" is still waiting for me to get back to the paused second draft.) Because I had a deadline to hit and couldn't emotionally engage with the book I was supposed to hand in the month after he died, I negotiated a substitute: I knew what the ninth Laundry Files book was about a long time before I wrote it, so I squeezed out "The Labyrinth Index" in a hurry. I'd spent the year leading up to his death writing a draft of "Ghost Engine", a wide-screen space opera, but there is this thing about people dying: it taints any creative project you're emotionally invested in that you're working on at the time, and only distance will let you get your detachment back, and with it the ability to work on that project. My father got ill again that spring, and being 93, he didn't recover. But my carefully planned sabbatical was spent on hospital bedside visits and anxiety, although at least I got a break from writing. Well, not only did he walk again, he got to do lots of things again, and he lived another decade, which was good. He survived, and then he was in a coma for three weeks, and when he awakened he was hemilaterally paralysed, and after a month he began to get some movement back but wasn't expected to ever walk again, and then. By which I mean "emergency hospital admission, not expected to survive the night" kind of ill. ![]() ![]() To make it work, I wrote a novella ("Palimpsest", which won a Hugo in 2010) and bolted it on top of a bunch of other short works to make a collection ("Wireless") which could be published in 2009. So I resolved to take a sabbatical, a six to nine month period in which I didn't need to write a novel or do anything except relax, process, and rebuild my creative energy. It's possible to write more than that - a lot more - if you follow a formula, but I was trying to break ground, so every book had to be fresh and different. But I was also 43 years old, and feeling extremely burned out, because I peaked at three novels in one year and had been averaging two a year for the first half of the decade. I'd had an epic six year breakthrough run, with about eight books coming out in a five year period, multiple consecutive Hugo nominations (and a win), and I was getting a handle on the whole writing-for-a-living thing.
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