Time for something new

There is a South Park episode where Randy Marsh gets obsessed with cooking shows and decides to dedicate his life to becoming a great chef. He quits his job and dedicates himself to the task. This drives his wife crazy, but she is unable to change his attitude until finally, to make a long story short, she gives him an "old fashioned" (hand job), and he concludes that "cooking is dumb" and goes back to life as before.

That's how I feel right now about writing literary fiction. I've given most of the last four years to it, not to mention all that time in grad school, and now, I just don't see what I saw in it. I've read every short story in the Pushcart and Best American Short Stories Anthologies for the last five years. I've read the Pulitzer-winning novels from that time, too. None of them has really changed my life the way I thought great literature should. Meanwhile, I continue to write stories that I think are getting better, but I'm having more trouble getting them published than I did a few years ago. Clearly, my ideas about what makes something worth reading do not match what the industry thinks makes something worth reading.

I was going to try to keep going for a full five years, but that just seems like a decision based entirely on the number of fingers on the human hand. I already know this isn't for me. I've done well enough I don't have to feel like I'm quitting because I just suck. But I also know I don't want to keep going forward. It's a good time to quit.

So what's next for me? I'm going to focus more on my day job as a translator. I'm going to try some different kinds of literature, probably science fiction to start with. I'm also going to read more non-fiction. I may take some courses in topics I feel stupid in, mostly information technology stuff. I don't know how to code in a single computer language. I've never taken calculus. These seem like things I ought to remedy.

I'll never stop writing. It's too much a part of how I figure things out for myself. But I think I'd like to write more about politics, religion, and other big-idea type stuff than just about writing. That's why I was interested in fiction in the first place. I don't know if I ought to start another blog, since the new one wouldn't be about writing, or just keep going on here and change the focus. Or maybe not write a blog at all, since blogs are so ten years ago that hardly anyone reads them.

I have found that blogging has been useful to me, personally, even if it's been of no use to anyone else. I see now why people used to keep journals. Writing this journal in public has been good enough for me that I will probably keep doing it in one form or another.