Context Matters

I recently waxed nostalgic about the heady days of 2008 to 2009, when it felt like my fiction writing career tracked along with far more promise than it does today. I was focused on my writing career to the exclusion of everything else, a host of stories were published and opportunities offered, and things felt possible in a way they don’t right now.

But a quick survey of the context in which I did all that work is pretty illuminating:

• I was younger, newly single, and looking for distraction.
• I was newly involved in the spec fic scene, and therefore a novelty.
• Social media was relatively new, and work gained attention because it was easier to reach one’s friends and communities with news.
• My father’s Parkinson’s disease was newly diagnosed, and hadn’t yet hit the point of physical and cognitive where I was increasingly conscious of both spending time with him and providing relief for my mum as his primary carer.
• I was unemployed, providing both time and impetus to write.
• I’d just gone through Clarion South, and emerged from those six weeks of focused work with a lot of heavily critiqued stories to finish up and submit.

That combination of time, necessity, and attention is a pretty powerful cocktail, and by 2011 its efficacy fading as my health, my dad’s health, social media, and my work situation changed.

Nostalgia’s a constant tempatation when what was feels out of reach here and now, but always remember that context matters.

No part of my life resembles the circumstances in which all that work was possible, and I’m unlikely to recreate them. Why expect the work to emerge at the same rate and quality as it did way back then?