There's no doubt it's been a while since I last communicated with my readers about anything to do with my writing. My most recent blog was months ago, and I've had very little to say on social media since I did some publicising of my most recently-published book, The Tribulations of Omega Girl. While I've never been the most prolific and active of authors. I'll admit that level of radio silence has been unusual for me, and I understand why it has led to some people wondering if I've just gone away, never to return.
Some authors do this - especially enthusiastic amateurs such as myself. It can be the case than an author simply runs out of things to say - the books are published, the small sum of Amazon royalties rolls in each month, and the author simply walks away from their pen name and back to the real world.
That's sort of what has happened to me.
One of the factors that first propelled me into writing was a lack of job satisfaction. My job was dull, slow, repetitive. I could complete the minimal amount of work I needed to do very quickly, which left me plenty of time to plug away writing naughty stories (and Tweeting about them). It wasn't an ideal situation - there were many times when I would have traded time to write for a more stimulating and varied role - but it meant I could be productive as an author at least.
For better or worse (and personally I feel that it's for the better) my regular career has finally picked up and I am now finding myself busy every day with both a volume and a new variety of work. Remembering how miserable my job used to make me compared to now, I can't complain too hard, but it means the long swathes of day when I had nothing to do but write fiction are naught but a memory.
Away from work, I do still have time to write, but I always preferred to write in the office. I have other hobbies that I enjoy, and a family to spend time with, when I'm at home. I have other ventures away from both work and writing which I have begun to put more time into - and as I had gotten to a point, when I'd completed Omega Girl, of having concluded all the projects that most held my interest, I wasn't about to rush into the next book or story. That little break became a month, then six months. I don't regret taking that time off of writing, but I do feel bad that it has caused some people to wonder if I have abandoned writing for good.
I certainly have no intention of quitting this fun little hobby - but I also think I needed a bit of time away from the keyboard, and social media.
Twitter was certainly something I felt 'done with' for a time. I'm not a writer with a huge number of followers, nor am I someone who has a lot of regular interactions with Twitter folk - much like in real life, I prefer to keep to myself and my intimate circle of friends and family. Twitter and other social media presences have always felt like more of an effort, particularly as I have no interest in Tweeting about home and personal life, or politics, leaving me with very little material to want to share.
So it is perhaps not surprising that my presence on social media, the thing that I do pretty much just to let people who read my books know that I'm still here, still okay, has fallen by the wayside.
But to be honest the real catalyst in causing me to mostly pause my Twitter activity was the situation with a certain individual who I blogged about last summer, who had been both a fan of mine and someone I was friendly with, but who was also a cisgender straight male pretending to be a cis lesbian woman - not just to me, but to many others, including online sex workers.
I'm not going to go over all that again, but the fact is, I had drawn an enormous, admittedly perhaps disproportionate, amount of confidence from the feedback this person had given me about my work; not just because of what they were saying, but because of who they were. The type of stories I write are female-focussed and female-led, but as a straight cisgender man I am well aware that I don't have experiences comparable to the people I am writing about. So I check myself, research where I can, and then fudge it. I know I won't get it right all the time, but I try to do better than the bad stories I've read in the past, and hope I'm not missing the mark too much. Getting feedback from a female reader who was very vocal about liking my characters as they were was a huge boost to my confidence, and discovering that they were someone who had only pretended to be female knocked that confidence back quite a lot.
But this isn't a woe-is-me post. If I make my writing confidence dependent on the feedback of one person, I'm asking for disappointment. I certainly don't plan to abandon writing, nor for that matter do I plan to abandon social media, because I fell for a hoax that, in the grand scheme of things, didn't harm me nearly as much as the people who engaged with this person sexually could have been harmed.
So these are the reasons I have been quiet, and it may be that for a while longer I am no longer an active presence online. Or it may be that as winter turns to spring I feel a renewed vigor and become something like my old self again.
Whatever happens, I want you to know that unlike some of the authors of the past who publish, somewhat secretively, online and pseudonymously, I have no plans to suddenly disappear forever. There are no deep dark secrets of identity in my closet, and no factors in my life that mean that I will be giving up writing altogether. I am working, slowly, on a new story which I think will be a lot of fun for my regular readers (as with all my other short pieces it will be free to read on Literotica), and I have a few more ideas further down the line that I think might work as fiction I could write.
So although perhaps the perfect storm of boredom, inspiration and time that led to the whirlwind of me putting out six books in three years has now passed - but there will definitely be more A D Rowen in future. You just might have to wait a wee bit longer now.