O HAI.

I’ve been gone for a while. I haven’t writ­ten here, or really any any­where else, for about three months. Dur­ing most of that time, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever write again. I’ve been the slap-​bitch of that old dog, depression.

Depres­sion is a weird thing. It’s part men­tal, obvi­ously, but also part very much phys­i­cal. My brain, thanks to a genetic muta­tion passed down on my mother’s side, doesn’t either pro­duce or retain enough of the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter sero­tonin. Low lev­els of sero­tonin suck all the color out of life, leav­ing the suf­ferer in a gray twi­light — sans sparkly vam­pires — where noth­ing much seems to mat­ter. No drive, no ambi­tion, no dreams of some­thing better.

In my case, the symp­toms of depres­sion are nor­mally held back by the SSRIs (selec­tive sero­tonin reup­take inhibitors) I take every day. But they can be pushed over the edge by an emo­tional trig­ger, the likes of which I got the first week of January.

I was already tee­ter­ing on the edge, because I’d just fin­ished writ­ing a novel, the first one I’d actu­ally fin­ished in thir­teen years. Writ­ers often go through some­thing very much like post-​partum depres­sion when they fin­ish a book, for largely the same rea­sons. We just fin­ished this really intense emo­tional com­mit­ment, and now it’s just… over. Now what? This is espe­cially hard to deal with if you, like me, get stalled try­ing to imme­di­ately jump into the next book.

Queso, I was already a lit­tle frag­ile deal­ing with post-​partum writer’s block, and then I lost my job. I mean I didn’t actu­ally lose my job I mean I know where my job is still. They just don’t let me go there any­more. Instead of trans­fer­ring from Old Job to New Job as expected, Old Job instead recalled me and then laid me off. Word had come down from On High that IT Sup­port had to cut pay­roll by 20%. If you want to do that and lose as few peo­ple as pos­si­ble because you’re barely hang­ing on as it is, you cut the peo­ple mak­ing more money than their peers. And who has two thumbs and was the high­est paid per­son on the Helpdesk? This guy!

But here’s where it gets screwed up. If they just trans­ferred me, as had already been approved, they’d lose my salary, but it wouldn’t count towards the 20% cut. So they had to lay me off instead so the book­keep­ing would work out. I lost my job in the Great Reces­sion because of frig­gin’ accountants.

As you might expect, the sheer cos­mic insult of this was enough to push me over the edge. At first, I watched a lot of TV. You see, the last thing a depressed per­son wants to do is con­front their own life, their own prob­lems. Life becomes an almost manic strug­gle to keep one­self dis­tracted, any­thing to avoid actu­ally think­ing about your life. You cling to these dis­trac­tions like a life pre­server in shark infested waters, because they make the pain go away.

Even­tu­ally, and this sur­prised me too, I ran out of foren­sic shows in syn­di­ca­tion to watch. I know! Between NCIS, the var­i­ous CSIs, Crim­i­nal Minds, Cold Case, etc. you’d think I’d be set, but over time I started to rec­og­nize the ones I’d already seen. And once you’ve seen @wilw run over by a semi, you really don’t need to see it again.

In Feb­ru­ary, I got into the beta for Star Trek Online, and zeroed in on some­thing else I could lose myself in. I now under­stand those guys at SF cons debat­ing the finer points of Trek canon, like why the Gorn are so damn angry. Trek has nearly fifty years of back­story, and the game ties into quite a bit of it. To get the full expe­ri­ence — and, as men­tioned, avoid my own expe­ri­ences — I immersed myself in Star Trek.

I’ve always been a casual Trek fan. I watched most of TNG and the early sea­sons of DS9, and of course all the movies. I remem­bered sit­ting with my Dad as a kid while he watched the orig­i­nal series in syn­di­ca­tion, but didn’t really remem­ber any­thing spe­cific. And I loved the JJ Abrams reboot last summer.

Now, in my des­per­a­tion to avoid think­ing about myself, I went full-​on Vul­can salute Trekkie. I bought all the TV series on iTunes and started watch­ing them in chrono­log­i­cal order: Enter­prise, TOS, movies, TNG, DS9, Voy­ager. I redown­loaded all the Trek nov­els I’d bought over the years from eReader and arranged them in chrono­log­i­cal order, and bought the dozen or so books that take place in the 30 years between the end of Neme­sis and the begin­ning of the game.

And I played a lot of the game.

Star Trek Online isn’t the first MMO I’ve played by a long shot, but it’s the first one where I’ve hit level cap, got­ten a char­ac­ter to the point where they can no longer progress because the devel­op­ers haven’t built that con­tent yet. But after weeks of shoot­ing Klin­gons, Romu­lans, Car­das­sians and Borg, some­thing at the back of my mind started to itch. A few weeks more, and I started to listen.

That itch was telling me that it was time to start writ­ing my own sto­ries again. Time to start blog­ging again, time to go back to the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles uni­verse and fin­ish telling the story. I have my own centuries-​long sprawl­ing space opera, dammit.

My ten­ta­tive plan is to go back and fin­ish rewrit­ing Rev­e­la­tion, make it as solid as I can, then post it to Smashwords/​iBooks, Ama­zon and Fictionwise/eReader/Barnes&Noble. Once it’s out of my hands and “in the wild,” I start on Cru­sade and ride it all the way to release as well, then Jihad and so on until the series is done. I have absolutely NO time­frame in mind in which to do this. I have no illu­sions or inten­tions about get­ting any of it pub­lished com­mer­cially or mak­ing a liv­ing as a nov­el­ist. This isn’t about business.

It’s about the itch. It’s about telling sto­ries. And it’s about time to get back to writing.