Quitting for a good reason

I've said I was quitting a million times, including twice recently. I wouldn't keep doing this fake-out, except I think when I disappear, it merits an answer. I don't mean to be the dramatic guy on your social media who makes a big deal out of leaving. All I want is to leave a marker to explain why I left in case anyone is curious.

Here are two reasons I'm stopping this blog and doubt I'll come back:

1) This doesn't really scratch the itch I want it to scratch. Since I quit my job last year, I've been reading more and more in philosophy of religion and other fields related to the big "Does God exist?" question. I'm getting pulled more and more toward that, and I find it a lot more intellectually satisfying and interesting than reading literary fiction. 

2) I originally shifted from writing whiny pieces about how getting fiction published is hard to trying my best to read fiction carefully and closely partly because I wanted to model what I thought good reading was, and partly because I wanted to become a better writer. I did become a better writer, but I don't think literary fiction wants me. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I didn't work hard enough. Maybe it's both. Or maybe people just don't like me. Whatever the reason, I've gone as far as I can or will go. I can't write better than the last six stories I tried to get published, and it hasn't been good enough. I can't will myself to write stories anymore, because I have so little belief they'll ever get published, at least by any journals anyone will ever read. And no, I don't want to write just for myself, or because I have to, or whatever other dumb shit writers tell themselves on literary social media circles. I tried and I failed. There's something else I'm more interested in anyway, so I might as well move on.

I'll probably reemerge after I've done enough digging into the God stuff, as a blogger or podcaster on the "Does God exist?" question. But it'll be on a different forum from this one.