Every two years versus every four years...

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I've been thinking about this a lot the past few weeks. I had been complaining - mostly to myself but also occasionally online - that I was putting out too many books. I published books in 2014, 2016 and 2018. Every two years felt like far too often. (Complaining is never a good idea. Complaining online is even worse. And complaining about complaining, and doing so online - as I'm doing here - must be the very worst of the worst.) I felt I should give myself more time between books to think about them and to reinvent what I was working on. However, now I finished another book at the very beginning of this year, and (somewhat due to the pandemic) I'm still not exactly sure when it will come out or with who. If it had come out now it would have been two years after the last one, exactly what I was telling myself I no longer wanted to do. Most likely, it will come out in 2022, four years after the last one, which is what I was telling myself would be a much preferable schedule: every four years. I'm now working on yet another book, and I'm considering making it longer, and working on it more slowly, in order that it won't be finished until 2026 at the very earliest, to stay on this imagined, ideal every four year schedule. And yet I can't stop worrying about when the book that's already finished will come out. And what people will think about it. How will it be received. Before I was obsessively worrying that I was putting out books too frequently. And now I'm obsessively worrying that the book I've already finished won't come out soon enough. How does one become this neurotic and this not consequent? And does it have anything to do with the exact same impulses that made me a writer in the first place? At any rate, I genuinely feel there's a lesson for me to learn in all of this. As I often say: it's my nature to be dissatisfied. The object of my dissatisfaction seems almost to be beside the point.



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