What Ever Happened to Robin Tompkins?

Those happy few that actually read this blog might be wondering where I have been since December last year? Have I, you may have wondered, joined the circus? Were my fingers so numb from incessant practising with those juggling balls, that I was unable to type? Did I run away to sea? Have I been working as a stoker on a tramp steamer in the South Seas? Have my fingers become so thick, calloused and begrimed with coal dust, that I can no longer operate the keys?

No…

I was just having an existential crisis or something… I lost my mojo. It had not slipped behind the cushions, it wasn’t in my other jacket, it was not anywhere to be found. Like some dodgy app, my ‘Writer Brain,’ shut down. It was not there. Tumbleweed blew across the space where it had been and we don’t even have tumbleweed in Britain, so that was doubly strange.

I have not been writing and it seemed somehow fraudulent to continue with a writing blog when I was not, you know, actually writing anything.

This has only ever happened to me once before and that is another story for another time. With that exception, my Writer Brain has been my constant companion since, well, always… My hidden superpower, or the Gollum to my Smeagol, depending on how I’m feeling about it at the time. This made me extremely unhappy.

So, where did it go and why?

Like everyone, the pandemic threw a wrecking ball through my life. I don’t have some dramatic, or tragic tale to tell at this point. I am not even going to go into detail, because although my life seemed to have suddenly become a trainwreck to me, compared to so many others, including good friends, I was, objectively speaking, quite lucky, my crisis quite mundane.

With modern thinking on mental health, I know I shouldn’t be feeling that way. I am aware that, ‘there is always somebody worse off than you,’ is not helpful and actually it never was. No one is shelling the supermarket where I shop. There aren’t floods or wild fires all around me. I have a roof over my head, family to talk to and food in the cupboard. My problems though are still my problems, they are real to me and I still have to solve them. Comparing them to other larger problems, does not invalidate them, or solve them. I know that, I do but still, being of a certain age and from a proper working-class background, ‘There is always somebody worse off than you,’ carries a lot of weight.

The destruction of old certainties, the collapse of long held plans and a sudden and enforced complete change of lifestyle all caught up with me, all of a sudden, wham! Without knowing it, I had been ignoring all of the above, pretending that my life had not irreversibly changed.

My writing, although it may not immediately seem obvious, was intimately caught up in all of this.

I think, on reflection, that there was always some part of me, not the rational bit, some inner child or some such, that expected my writing to come along and save me if I ever got into a serious corner. If I just had more time, more time to write and promote my books, then I would be more successful. I would make money from them… I would be a full-time author.

Well, suddenly I had the time, I really did and I worked hard, really hard, on the writing and the promoting and on some other creative notions that I had and, and, and… Nothing. I sold no more books than before, I was not any better known, nothing I had slogged away so grimly at had made any difference at all, except that it had sucked the joy out of writing for me.

My Writer Brain shut down in protest.

I suddenly had a real understanding of those comics where the hero loses their powers and they feel helpless, they wonder who they are without them, if they have any value? I had always considered my writing to be a hidden superpower. That is even how I defined it on my Goodreads initial interview. My alter ego is ‘Writer bloke.’ Only now I couldn’t write. I am at peace when I write, I go somewhere else when I write. When things get tough, the tough get writing. Only, I couldn’t. I was busy having a crisis and one of my chief coping mechanisms, one of my finest self-help tools, was gone.

I wrote a whole chapter of my current book last week.

What’s that you say? So, what? One chapter? Only another sixty thousand or so words to go, eh? Well, I was genuinely beginning to wonder if I would ever write again and that is one more chapter than I had written in months.

My problems are not over, the shape of my new life isn’t completely clear to me yet it’s a work in progress. The thing is that I have now remembered that life is always a work in progress, something I lost sight of.

I have also remembered why I write. Because I can and because I want to. Because it is a part of my identity. Because I have things I want to say. Because I love to tell tales, to entertain, to move people when I can. To give people somewhere to go when they read the stories, in the same way I do when I write them. Somewhere not here, somewhere apart from worry and trouble.

That’s why I write, not to make money.

That’s just as well, because I am an indie author. By and large we don’t make money. We have complete freedom to write what we want, when we want and how we want. How the book looks, how it is promoted, everything single thing about it is under our complete control. This is actually pretty wonderful; I had forgotten that too.

So, I don’t sell many copies and I don’t make much money… well, nothing’s perfect. The thing is, I would rather accept that and welcome back my old friend, ‘Writer Brain,’ than fight it and lose everything.

I wrote a whole chapter of my current book last week. You know what that means? It means I’m back…