My personal observation: When you're in your 20s to 40s, your aim is to accumulate stuff, and when you're in your 50s and older, your aim is to let go of stuff. I've been doing a bit of a purge, getting rid of furniture, clothes, books, and knicknacks. I've even gone through my cabinet of garden seeds and asked myself if I'm really going to plant 4-year-old garlic bulbils. Of course not! Out they go.
Part of the decluttering process has been going through my filing cabinet and thumb drives, cleaning up old manuscripts I've never done anything with. They've been weighing me down, always in the back of my mind like a neglected obligation. It feels like I just don't have the time or energy to take the usual approach with traditional publishers, and some of the stories are novella-length, not really book-length, so it's easiest just to put them out there through self-publishing (which, I'll fully confess, I've hitherto considered a bit like cheating).
But you know what? It's been very freeing. No stress, no deadlines, no sales mentality. Just rekindling the forgotten joy of writing. Polishing and editing and setting them loose into the wild. I think after so many years of dealing with the traditional publishing scene, books had become a product. I'd become a bit jaded and lost the pleasure of words. I'm recapturing that now, and it's been wonderful. Now it really is all about creativity, not commerce, and that makes all the difference.
And THAT, my dears, is what AI users don't understand.
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