This explains a lot. Namely, why the voices in my head won’t shut up until I write their incessant babbling down on paper:
When the researchers looked specifically at authors, they found that they are overrepresented among people with schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety syndrome, and substance abuse problems. Authors were also almost twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population.
Well, yeah. Spend years inventing a whole world inside your head, getting it into a readable form, and polishing it until every syllable flows across the pages like a rushing stream. Then you sweat blood whittling all that down into a three-sentence blurb and shotgun it out to agents and publishers, only to have them reject it. Sometimes rudely.
So you revise, edit, and do it all over again. Generally with better results, but still nothing that ends up with a publishing deal. Wash, rinse, repeat. Thank God for the rise of indie publishing, because a couple years of that query/reject/repeat cycle left me in a pretty sorry mental state.
At least now I have some control over the process and am making halfway decent money from my work. It’s still a hard slog, though. So if I don’t post anything for a while, it might be a good idea to send someone over to check on me.
The Chiles Files 