Seriously? Please don’t write a series… romantically

[Havenstone]

@LiliArch

It can be really really hard to admit to yourself you’ve burnt yourself out and the project is dead.

Absolutely. And it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I said on this other thread:

@Havenstone

For the few authors that might genuinely come back, it would be a shame if fans discouraged them by pushing for a hard yes-no after a few months of hiatus.

@Havenstone

It’s harder than you may think for an author to make a post that says nothing other than: “I’m alive but don’t know what to tell you about the WIP. Maybe I’ll come back to it, maybe not.”

@Havenstone

Most authors who think they’re going to finish their WIPs are wrong. But I still say that we the reading public ought to treat their crazy, probably-mistaken hope as having more value than our closure…

For almost any creator, let alone ones doing it as a spare-time creative side gig, there’ll be times where their hope gets awfully fragile. An author who feels forced by their fans’ expectations to make an update during one of those rough stretches has to try to put that unlikely-seeming hope into words–which can easily kill it.

A lot of projects will go through a Schrodinger’s Cat phase where if observed, they’ll probably turn out to be dead…but if they make it through without a wave-function collapse, they may come out of the box alive after all.