The Crazy-Eyed Wild Ambitions Phase

My Mid-life Crisis, Part 2

In the last edition of this series I admitted I’ve become a cliché. I confessed my mid-life crisis and told you about my severe medical crisis which is about half of what triggered my mid-life crisis.

As I teased, in this season I was in search of something, so I started to pursue some wild ambitions. Here they are.

This might shock most everyone that knows me, but I worked on a doctorate by starting a dissertation. I told almost nobody. I had never thought of myself as an academic, but with a passion in mind I read and marked up several hundred scholarly articles and a bunch of dissertations in a zone I thought I might advance. I bought about 80 new books and found myself in one every evening. I spent more time with Zotero, Roam Research, and inter-library loan than I care to remember. I started to feel like one of those obsessed nerds who can only talk and think about one obscure subject they are researching.

My dissertation proposal went through several rounds of committee revisions, and then there came the moment to launch in, to finally commit to years of writing and re-writing on what I was learning from my studies and my advisor. But it dawned on me in the last month of that process that I had lost the passion for it. I got advice from several academics I respect, saying, "If you feel that way at the beginning it's a bad sign. Many feel that way at the end, but not the beginning."

So I bailed. Pulled the plug. Hit the eject button. Half of me feels like it was all a waste of time, but the other half of me is glad I at least got into it as far as I did. I had always wondered if I would or should or even could do that kind of work, and now I know: I don't want to, at least not anytime soon.

I learned so much in that research. I suppose some day I may turn it into a book with a broader audience. But not soon. I need to let it sit and ruminate on it for a long while. Academic writing is impenetrable to most people, and I’d need to re-write it all from square one. Who knows, maybe I just did it for my own development?

So, part of my searching for something included work on a dissertation that never came to be. If you think that's strange news, wait till you hear what’s next.

After I had tabled my research, perhaps forever, I had a ton of time on my hands. I had written some 50,000 words of my own thinking on the subject, compiled mounds of research, and had come to grips with the possibility that nobody would ever read it. But I had some 3-5 hours a day (from about 5-8 in the AM and all my nights and weekends) on my hands to burn beyond my work as a consultant and coach, so I needed a new project. So I obviously did what any not-so-self-respecting mid-life crisis cliché fella would do: 

I started writing a science-fiction novel.

Seriously. I launched into writing an epic science-fiction novel which would introduce a four part series with many fantasy genre elements (now you see how much of a mid-life cliché I have truly become). I developed worlds and cultures and pronunciations. I invented new technologies and advanced alien abilities that bordered on the magical. I made up names, pronunciations, locations, cities, geography, back stories, romances, annotated maps, deep lore, and inter-planetary governmental organizations. I had to work out the physical and social science of each planet, along with religions and their corresponding sacred texts and prophecies and how they they all compared and contrasted.

I had dabbled in fiction for years as a vacation hobby (literally, I would take my laptop and occasionally write fiction for fun on vacation), but this time I dove in with all my heart. I had a daily goal of writing 1,000 words before most people had their first cup of coffee or hit the commute. After about six months, I had written precisely 86,934 words in the novel (my writing app tracks the words like a scorecard). I was half-way through my outline, with an interwoven plot I believed was heating up to a boil. 

And then I hit the wall. Almost all authors have this. I’ve had it before in non-fiction (I’ve published more than ten non-fiction books and one children’s book). But with fiction it is way more complicated, and I’m no genius. I had some major problems with the plot. I painfully realized I must cut or radically re-write two main characters. I discovered that hard-to-relate-to-for-non-writers-but-is-actually-common-condition of "over-writing a project." What I had would not fit into one volume and reach a climax in time. My planned four-part series wouldn't be enough either. I was an overwhelmed rookie fiction writer and no message board, confidential coaching, writing book, or writer’s group (which I went to under-cover) seemed to help me solve it.

So, I shelved the project. I stopped writing the massive tome. I don't say "quit" because I could pick it all up again tomorrow. But, I stopped actively pursing it, and stopped getting up crazy early every day to write. I sleep in now, or at least sleep in till normal humans tend to get up, ya know, like 6:30.

As you can see, in terms of chasing clichés in the mid-life crisis, I am a prime example. In the space of just one calendar year I had written more than 130,000 words for two wildly different projects. For comparison, that totals about as many words as three volumes of the C.S. Lewis-penned Chronicles of Narnia. All that and even my wife hasn't read one word of either of them because I've kept it all to myself, writing in the dark.

Now you know why I unceremoniously took a break from writing for my DruGroup Substack. I was writing, more than ever before in fact, but it just never reached the "fit for public consumption" mark.

That's some of what's happened with me in the last couple years. Along the way I've done a great many other things, but so far haven't bought a motorcycle and I haven't contemplated divorce (although if I did the former it might cause my wife to consider the latter.) I thought I should just tell you of my experience, to confess that I've been searching for something. I don't entirely know what that is. I'm still on the journey. I'm 48 years old, but lack the certitude I had when I was 28.

I am going to share more about where I am in the journey and some other decisions I've made with my wife for our future. Changes are afoot. But I'll save that for the next few times I write. I thought it was more honest to come clean with you that I've been on a bit of a journey of searching in this mid-life crisis.

I still spend the better part of every day working to mobilize, clarify, coach, & launch. That, the mission, and the Kingdom of God remain unchanged. But how I live that out has been radically shifting, I believe, eventually for the better.

But first, I'll have to share some underlying stuff I'm sorting out. I'll do that in the next part of this series here.

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So, what’s something you started but didn’t finish? Or what’s a weird hobby you picked up randomly you’d like to confess now that I confessed mine? Leave a comment to share.

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