What if the skills that made you a successful writer start to ruin your life?
I used to make most of my money at shows, but after COVID doing them is literally killing me. How can you keep your author business afloat when the skills you relied on start destroying you?
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I’ve been doing conventions for about ten years. I started in May 2014, so not quite ten years, but I’ve done close to 200 shows during that time, which makes it feel like I’ve been doing them since I was a zygote.
I won’t say it was ever “fun”. It had its moments, but fun or not there’s no doubt shows were necessary for my survival. Whenever I needed money, I could always fall back on shows, at least until they were ripped from us all when the world ended in March 2020.
When I ran the convention circuit from 2014-2020, I needed the money desperately to keep my business going. I generally had a revolving book production fund of $30,000 for years and years, along with lots of other business expenses, and shows allowed the whole operation to exist.
Without them, I never would have built the body of work that I stand on now.
Something changed when I came back to shows in 2021 after the pandemic “ended”, though.
Yes, during that time I discovered other ways to make money, so shows weren’t critical for my survival, but there was something else.
It’s hard to describe. I just found the people were…different when I came back. Not Invasion of the Body Snatchers or They Live different. Not even Children of the Corn different.
Just different.
I chalked it up to the fact I was wearing a mask, and that everyone was simply skittish about being around other humans.
I assumed most of my friends weren’t tabling at the show because they were nervous about COVID, and that my stomach churned because I was nervous about being around so many humans at once.
When I started doing shows all those eons ago, the veterans of the con scene told me that the industry churned over completely every few years, and if I did it long enough then I would look up one day and the industry will move on without me.
I was cocky, though, and I assumed it would never happen to me.
Turns out old-timers know what they’re talking about, and never was that fact clearer than at Wondercon this year.
I was used to walking through artist alley and seeing friends filling every stall with their amazing art. This year, I only recognized about 10% of the vendors.
There were all new artists that I had never seen before and a different group of attendees that replaced my regulars. The industry shifted under me bringing in a whole new wave of people.
I was now the old veteran in the room instead of the upstart with a chip on their shoulder.
The industry turned over just like the old timers said, bringing in a new crop of hungry artists, and most of my friends were no longer there slinging their work.
Heck, most of my regulars weren’t even at the show this year.
This business is tough, and if you can make it more than a couple of years doing this work you are forged in fire. Still, fire will destroy just about anything given enough time.
Still, what I was most surprised about wasn’t the fact that the industry shifted under me.
It’s how I changed how I interact with the industry.
I have for the majority of my career been fueled by rage and spite. Even the name of my company, Wannabe Press, was a snarky response to people telling me I would never make it.
There is spite baked right into our mascot.
People telling me “no” drove me to prove them wrong…but an interesting thing happened in the intervening years between 2010 when I launched my comics career and this weekend.
I proved them wrong.
I created a body of work. By any stretch of the imagination, I succeeded. I broke in. I stayed in. I have nothing to prove.
The fire inside me isn’t gone, but it had been reduced to little more than embers.
I talk about being chronically ill often, but in years past it was possible to ignore my varied sicknesses for a few days at a time and drown them with caffeine when they did bubble up.
I would suffer after a show for pushing myself, but I was young enough to recover and bitter enough to keep going even when I should have rested.
I never knew how to take care of myself in my younger days, so I didn’t even know what it meant to feel well.
That changed with the pandemic and I turned inward to find out how to keep going. I saw how life could be, and what I was missing by running myself ragged.
I finally knew what it meant to be happy, even if only in fits and spurts, and now I’m no longer willing to destroy myself to sell a few more books. I don’t have that extra gear that convinced so many people to give my books a try.
I’ve been taking myself too well for too long to allow my mind to treat my body so poorly.
Shows used to be the only thing I knew how to do, and so I crushed shows. I put everything into them. They kept my company going even when I couldn’t do anything else right, and if I died on the show floor, so be it.
That sounds bonkers now, but I fervently believed it. Ethan Hawke’s character in Gattaca was my patron saint.
But eventually, I was lucky enough to learn skills and surround myself with people who showed me how to build a more sustainable business. Now, I can’t go back to how it used to be.
The pandemic forced me to grow in ways I never had time to do when I was running from show to show.
It made me grow in the ways I needed to in order to make my life work for me. It taught me that if something stops serving you, it’s possible to take a step back and learn new skills to help you like your life better.
You can always grow.
It is never too late to evolve, but in evolving, it will be hard to recognize the you of years past.
This past weekend at Wondercon, as the convention hall was less populated than a ghost town and the people who did pass largely looked at me like I had just eaten a baby in front of them for having the audacity to pitch them my books, I felt blessed that I no longer had to do that work to survive.
It’s a wonderful place to be mentally and comes with an inner stillness that I never could have imagined in my rageful youth.
However, in proving my thesis that I belonged, I also lost my edge.
I found myself looking at people who stopped by my table, remembering that I was supposed to open my mouth to pitch them, and just…refusing to do it.
I would have rather given the books away for free than feel the way I used to again (in fact, I did give some books away instead of pitching people when the anxiety became too much).
Yes, some still bought, and my regulars who showed up were wonderful as always, but I didn’t have the energy to make that pitch most of the time, especially to strangers.
Even when I did, it wasn’t with the same intensity.
Instead, I watched the whole of my past life play out in front of me, thousands of interactions collapsing in upon themselves like the edge of a blade.
There is a truth that I had to wrestle with over the last several years.
What got me here won’t get me there.
In years past, I had to do things that worked whether I hated them or not, but my body grew older and less willing to respond to force of will, and so I had to reinvent myself.
I did an enormous about of inner work, and in doing so grew in ways I could never even conceive of back in 2019. However, in doing so, I became a person younger me would not recognize.
He might even be insulted that I could possibly lose an opportunity to make money at a place like Wondercon.
That used to be my best show, or at least my most profitable.
He would certainly not understand anything I’ve talked about in this post. He would have called me soft.
If there’s something I learned in the past year, it’s that the goal of this whole thing we call existence is to create a life where you are allowed to be soft and feel safe enough to let down your guard. I listened to an interview with Brené Brown recently and she said something I’ve been churning over since I heard it.
I have deleted the cursing from this quote for those with sensitive eyes.
But what I would say to people, what I always say is the same for me and I’m sure the same for you, that we all grew up and experienced to varying degrees, trauma, disappointment, [redacted cursing], you know, hard stuff. We armored up and at some point that armor no longer serves us. And so what I think I would say to that person is “How is not talking about this serving you?”
I’ve been sober for 23 years. So someone in AA would be like, “How’s that [redacted cursing] working for you?” I probably would put a softer spin on it than that—over black coffee and a cigarette. But I would say that “It’s not serving anymore. And now the weight of the armor is too heavy and it’s not protecting you. It’s keeping you from being seen and known by others.”
And so this is, I mean, to just tell you quintessentially, this is the developmental milestone of midlife. From late thirties to, through probably your sixties, this is the question. Yeah. This is when the universe comes down and puts her hands on your shoulders and pulls you close and whispers in your ear, “[redacted cursing] You’re halfway to dead. The armor is keeping you from growing into the gifts I’ve given you. That is not without penalty. Time is up.” So this is what you see happen to people in midlife, and it’s not a crisis. It’s a slow, brutal unraveling. And this is where everything that we thought protected us keeps us from being the partners, the parents, the professionals, the people that we want to be.
And there are only, I’ve only seen—this is a fork in the road—I’ve only seen two responses to this visit from the universe. Well, I guess there’s, there was my response, which I was like, “Screw you. Bring it. You think you can best me?” And then it was just one nightmare situation after another until you know, you’re not going to win that fight.
Trying to find a way to take off the armor that has grown too cumbersome resonates deeply with me.
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Brene Brown, but I have been going back and diving into her books and realized that most of the stuff I hated were just truths about myself I didn’t want to or couldn’t acknowledge about myself.
I’ve done so much work to change myself for the better, but there are still parts of myself, even with years of work, that seem baked into my core.
In the past, I would have felt magnanimous simply tolerating the things about myself I couldn’t change, but over the last several years, I’ve embraced the process of accepting those parts of myself.
There are many things I can, and did, change, but there are others weaved into my DNA. No matter how much work I do, there is a residue of them I can’t scrub from my soul.
I will always, for instance, default to anger when stressed. I can cut off the stress cycle before it presents itself as rage, but once triggered, all I can do is complete the stress cycle without taking it out on anything or anyone, even if they deserve it.
Additionally, some negative things about myself I can’t change without wiping out behaviors I love about myself. For instance, that same anger that goads me to lash out also encourages me to stand up to injustice.
I love that part of myself, even if it also has negative consequences I have to monitor closely.
Some things about myself will never change. They can only be accepted. It turns out that tolerating and accepting are two very different things and it took a ton of inner work to realize that fact.
When you tolerate a screaming baby on a plane, you’ve agreed to grit your teeth and bear the inconvenience. You still might hate the baby, but you tolerate its existence and know there is nothing you can do about it. It is an act of repressing hate.
Accepting that screaming baby is an act of love.
You acknowledge the baby is in pain, and that you would likely be in the same situation. Maybe you even are in the same situation, but dealing with it better than they are because you have decades more experience. You do not only swallow your hate, but extend your love to that little baby, and their family, because you know how much they suffer.
It does not change the situation. Only your relationship to it.
In my pursuit of accepting my own flaws, I found that I am driven by anger and lash out when I am in pain. In my messy past, I could redirect that anger into anxiety, and use it for fuel to make sales, but it didn’t burn clean.
In fact, it was killing me.
Shows were killing me because I was dealing with them in an unhealthy way. I was using my own anger and hate to drive me, and by evolving my mindset, I’ve been unable to connect with that part of my soul that fueled me for so long.
More so, I don’t want to connect with it.
I never liked using anger as fuel, but it burned hot and fast. It got me from one place to another quickly, even if I was exhausted when I arrived and hated every minute of the journey. Now that I am better at accepting that part of myself and feeding it clean energy, going back to that dirty fuel feels god awful.
Clean energy doesn’t burn as hot, but it sustains for much longer.
Angry fuel always felt terrible. I just didn’t know there was any way to exist that didn’t feel terrible.
I feel so much sympathy for that younger person who was screaming into the void that he mattered, and begging people to validate him, all the time using dirty fuel that made him bitter.
In going back to shows, I find that while I can’t connect with that past self, I can empathize with him. Sometimes, I can even find the core of what made people resonate so deeply with his work.
Mostly, I want to give him a hug and tell him he was loved even if he couldn’t love himself. I often say that I try very hard to be kind to future Russell, but going forward I also want to be kind to past Russell, too.
Conventions built my career, and anger fueled that growth. However, I no longer want to be angry. I don’t think that will get me where I want to go, which is to lead people better and to work in concert with other people to grow my business to the next level.
Yes, controlling everything and putting on armor to protect myself against being taken advantage of got me here, and built a body of work I can be proud of, but it won’t serve me in the next phase of my career.
That’s not to say the work that old Russell built doesn’t serve me now.
Conventions taught me so much, not the least of which is how to do hard things for longer than you ever thought possible.
A lot of the skills I developed in my early career, whether it be creating courses, writing books, or running book marketing for clients, are exactly the skills I use now, but now I express them in a healthier way.
I closed off those parts of myself because they made me feel terrible and I thought they could only ever make me feel terrible, but in reexamining my past lives, I have been able to open those parts of myself and find better ways of engaging with those projects that once crippled my soul.
I will still do shows, but I won’t do them like I used to do them. I learned in the past few years that life is not black and white, it is filled with shades of gray. You can take what serves you, even if it’s only a glimmer of something.
I have spent my whole life ignoring partnerships in service of doing everything myself. The wounds of partnership are deep and numerous, but in continuing to do so, I was abandoning the $100,000 partnership opportunity to make a $20 sale.
Don’t get me wrong, you need the $20 sale to pay your mortgage this month, but if you only see the $20 sale, you will only ever make the $20 sale.
It was short-sighted, but I don’t regret it. That version of Russell built this version of him, but I need to exist in the world in a different way moving forward.
Both of these things can be true.
You build yourself from the ashes of your past self, and this version of you is building whatever will come next, for better or worse. What’s wonderful is you get to decide every day whether you are building your future self up or tearing it down.
Yes, the industry shifted under me while I was gone from shows, but I shifted as well.
Now, I am an old-timer, which is how I know I’m right about all this stuff.
The Author Stack sits at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers build more sustainable businesses that allow them to thrive while creating work that lights them up inside. We strive to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away from them.
We have hundreds of articles in our archive, along with fiction and non-fiction books for paid members.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
I think a lot of us went through a process of reevaluation of our lives thanks to the pandemic, and were forced to develop ourselves in painful, but ultimately positive ways. I came out the other end with much the same conclusion. I still do shows, but not as many as before, and I wasn't doing anywhere near the amount you were at your peak!