Packing It In and Moving On

Despite being the only thing I purport to care about doing with my life, I have struggled enormously with writing and story production, to a level that is frankly soul-crushing at this point. Despite brief periods of productivity that seem to hit me from truly nowhere, my inability to produce has steadily gotten worse, in multiple regards. I have whined endlessly about my many problems, to the point I am far long sick of hearing myself go on about it, so I won’t go down the list here. If you’ve had to put up with me talking about it, then you already know at least some of the deal.
 
The last few years, I have been attempting to process these toxic feelings through various metafiction stories. At one point, I thought I had gotten through it, but apparently, I wasn’t done. With the writing and posting of Imaginator – The Final Story of Sharkerbob, I truly hope to be so now. To that end, I am going to do something I think has been long overdue.
 
I am announcing my “retirement” as Sharkerbob.
 
Fortunately, this is not going to be any great loss. I am a genuine nobody on the internet. Barely a handful of people have ever even looked at this blog. I have no followers. And that’s fine. I didn’t start this platform to become famous. I was, however, hoping to have done a lot more under this penname up to this point. As much as I struggled before, starting this blog was supposed to be part of the push to take my craft seriously, knuckle down on my focus, and starting making things on the regular. When I wrote Graven back in 2018, I really thought I’d done it. That I’d busted through the mountain, proven I could write a big, meaningful story, and I could finally start producing my genre fiction in earnest.
 
Turns out Graven was a complete fluke. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed to do it at all, and I know I couldn’t do it again now. Right place, right time, right motivations, right amount of energy, I guess. It was a lightning strike. It turned out it was also too little, too late. I’d already burned up so much of my creative gumption and confidence and capability in the years prior, that Graven ended up decidedly not being a new flagship to lead a new fleet from port. Instead, it was the last lifeboat escaping a long-sinking cruiser.
 
Obviously, I wrote a few other things since Graven, but the majority of it has all been related to the metafictional writing therapy. Sharkerbob has unfortunately become defined, at least to me, as a writer who can’t write. The absolutely pitiful amount of content I have published under that name doesn’t even represent 1% of the ideas I had hoped to produce works from. At some point, Sharkerbob became more driven to write, not because he wanted to write, but because he resented himself for not writing. And that is a lamentable and misplaced motivation, one highly prone to self-sabotage.
 
I’d like to not be that kind of writer anymore. To this end, I am closing the book on this chapter of my creativity. There is, however, a reason for the quotes around “retirement”. I am not giving up creating things. I want to keep writing and drawing, with the eventual goal of doing comics again, or at least some medium where I can make use of both skills.
 
However, my intention going forward is to start fresh with a new penname and a new direction, with no connections to my previous works. In part, this is to wipe the slate clean, so I can feel free to explore ideas without feeling beholden in various ways to the interconnected canons of my past works. It is also to break free from the baggage of past associations, namely my incredibly short-sighted sloppiness in referencing connections to other pennames. If you know, you know, and I wish you didn’t, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. Suffice to say, if my future endeavors are to go anywhere, I’d prefer to not have a dump truck full of literary skeletons always trailing behind me.
 
Having said that, there are still things from Sharkerbob, from the AEP Multiverse, from those other pennames, that I still think are worth salvaging. Character ideas and worldbuilding concepts I’m not completely ready to give up on yet. I’ll have to reforge them, of course, and I am aware it’s risky to indulge in the bad old habits of reworking failed ideas yet again. But this time around, I hope to do so without all the needless baggage and negativity tainting the process. Easier said than done, of course, but hey, if nothing else, it’ll force me to get more creative with what I got.
 
So, that’s pretty much all there is to say on the matter. I’m know I’m mostly speaking into a void with this post, but for me, it’s part of the ritual of moving on. Here’s to another couple of decades before the next metafictional crisis story inevitably gets written!
 
For those of you who have followed my work, I appreciate your support. So long, and take care of yourselves!

Imaginator - The Final Story of Sharkerbob

Author's Note: This is a significant rewrite of The Final Story of Salvador Roberts, with the major differences occurring in the latter half. I have decided to leave that original version still up, for the sake of comparison. This rewrite also incorporates reinterpretations of a few key moments from SalQuest, which was the first draft of an intended sequel adventure, which ultimately proved impossible for me to work out. Due to several considerations, I have decided it best to remove SalQuest from the archive.