Why I stopped writing

Here lie the bones of Yelena Calavera.

She was an excellent companion as I navigated the wasteland of my writing career during my twenties. Perfectly equipped with the full suite of apocalypse skills, she offered water and shade, shelter from the harsh realities of writing and publishing in the era of social media.

That is, until she stopped me from writing.

It happened slowly at first, an imperceptible quietening at the generative core of creativity. Then, a hardening and setting of a protective artifice. And finally, a stifling ossification.

No living voices call out from this church of bones.

What follows is a reconstruction of the reasons I stopped writing, a gathering of the splinters and shards of a ribcage and a spine, the delicate finger bones of writing hands dismembered by keyboard and avatar.

It is the truth of the fiction of Yelena Calavera, her eulogy, and a spell to reanimate the real.

Reason 1: I stopped writing because I was Facebook trolled by a philosopher

Facebook is evil. I hate Facebook. Facebook is why I stopped writing.

 I was bullied on Facebook by some guy who studied philosophy at a fancy European university.

 He trolled one of my posts by asserting that he was taking it upon himself to call me out on my bullshit on behalf of all Internet users everywhere.

 The essence of his criticism was that, without a formal philosophy degree, I had no right to share musings about life and that what I had to say lacked philosophical rigour.

 He was quite right; I did not situate my musings within any philosophical tradition.  This is not surprising; I did not study philosophy. But, this was not because I made poor life choices that I hoped would one day exclude me from participating in public discourse, but because I was not interested in engaging with my experience of the world in this way.

My pursuit is direct, raw, sensorial, and cinematic. I just try to describe what I see and feel with high fidelity. This is not for everyone.

Similarly, I did not study accounting or aeronautical engineering and so on.

No doubt, if I had been trolled by an accountant, a software developer, or an aeronautical engineer they could have argued that I should not say anything about the ways in which the global financial system is broken because I don’t understand how balance sheets work, I can’t complain about the material and water footprint of AI because I can’t write a single line of code, and I can’t talk about the effects of the aviation industry on climate and wildlife because I don’t understand how jet engines work.

If I indulge my bully, I do have to admit that I am unqualified in an infinite number of different fields and I lack coherent lexicons for all these paradigms.

I’m just a primitive consciousness let loose in a watering can full of words.

I stopped writing because my musings are tinny, and their outpourings rattle around embarrassingly on the barren ground of analytical reductionism.

It’s true: I resort to rogue metaphors, and I mix them most unscrupulously.

Fortunately for me, Ursula le Guin and Donella Meadows swooped in like submarines rising to rescue a flock of seagulls marooned on an iceberg.

I say this because only the absurd violence of nonsense can shred these bounded languages that enclose our ideas.

As culture eats strategy, the chaos of dreaming eats discourse for breakfast.

But, all this is just me talking myself down off the ledge after the fact.

At the time, I was completely unable to respond to my troll and a dear friend sprang to my defence, for which I was grateful. I blocked the troll and brushed off the incident, but it disturbed me more than I let on.

I stopped writing because I had, and still have, a crippling case of impostor syndrome.

Reason 2: I stopped writing because my parody piece got a bad Amazon review after a collaboration turned toxic

This one is exactly what it says on the tin.

I collaborated with a fashion designer, photographer, and a few other people who made up the cast of characters for a particularly dark and cynical piece of writing accompanied by a photo series featuring corsetry and other Victorian-inspired apparel.

The project died in ignominy for two very simple reasons: the notoriety of some of my collaborators, who were not very nice people, and my own ego getting in the way, meaning I was not a very nice person either at that time.

Despite multiple rounds of proofreading and editing, the novella contained a typo in the first paragraph of the first page. I had written it to be so stylised that it was almost juvenile, which I thought was terribly clever, only to have this promise fulfilled by a seriously amateurish mistake in the text.

The first Amazon review of that work was scathing, which it deserved not only on account of the typo, but as just reward for the circumstances surrounding its genesis.

I had also been writing for a few online publications doing event and venue reviews, interviews with bands etc. I intensely disliked the style of ‘Gonzo journalism’ that I adopted as part of a writing persona I liked even less.

My moniker was a smoke screen and behind it was Ayla, my real Self, lugging around that other big name, Y’ael, which was so wild and elemental that with every new introduction it had to be wrestled to the ground. Sometimes the name bolted from my mouth as a strange phonetic assemblage that I regretted instantly and that left the other with little hope of repeating something even vaguely resembling my name. Instead they only dropped in a few mangled syllables and looked away sheepishly when I regarded this display with disdain. It’s a certain way to get off on the wrong foot.

Oh for fuckssake. Someone said ‘WAH-yell’ again.

 ‘Yelena Calavera’ was containable within human language. It got the general point across, and it risked nothing.

 But, it took on a life of its own and soon Yelena was drinking and smoking too much, earning a pittance churning out writing she hated and that her readers at JHBLive and Mahala loved to hate at best, or at worst, failed to notice.

The moribund trajectory terminated with one cutting article about a comedy night being pulled from the JHBLive site after readers complained, an article on Mahala about the Oppikoppi Festival where Deftones played being eviscerated in the comments section, and the editor at Muse Magazine responding to a submission about an alt-J concert with a resounding ‘WTF’.

Yelena never wrote for any of those publications again.

Gonzo had left the building, baby. Gone-gone-gone- gone-zo. I wasn’t sorry to see him go. But would Yelena follow?

I stopped writing because I lost myself and I was writing trash.

Reason 3: I stopped writing because my dystopian novel was disregarded as a trope

When I was a small child, I narrated my stories to my father and he typed them up on his computer for me.

I started writing them down myself when I was about eight or nine and I looked forward to creative writing assignments at school so that I could channel them onto paper.

My earliest stories were inspired by the faerie tales my parents read to me so often when I was little and by the other books I was reading—library books my mother took out for me or special selections my father brought home from his urban wanderings.

Reading and writing seemed to go together.

I was incredibly fortunate in that many of my teachers strongly and actively encouraged my love of stories. I remember vividly a beloved teacher reading one of my stories aloud to the class and another set of teachers discussing a story I had written, unaware that I was listening.

“I’ve read it!” My English teacher said excitedly to my home room teacher as we stood in the assembly line outside in the quad one morning.

In high school, as is customary, I entered a period of turgid and abysmal poetry that lasted for some time. I wrote suitably cringe-worthy pieces covering the common themes of puberty: feelings of isolation and specialness, teenage romance etc.

The rebel kids had a poetry society going on; we smoked by the gym and read poems to one another. They were all four-lined stanzas of kitsch and predictable rhyming couplets treating profound, existential topics with acrid surface ointments.

Nevertheless, something sang to us in our words, even as the fumes rolled off our tongues.

We were peering into our own developing psyches and yes, drinking from the fire-hose of language to excrete crude substances, but this was a necessary step in the befriending of words that precedes development of fluency and subtlety.

I do not believe I had progressed sufficiently on this journey at the time I applied for a Master’s programme in creative writing. Looking back, the compassionate contents of the rejection letter indicated as much.

After the fall of the Gonzo Empire, I withdrew from the online journalistic embarrassment to concentrate on finishing the one remaining creative writing project I had going with Fox & Raven Publishing: my novel, Letters to the Black Underground.

After gnashing away at midnight dictations into a voice recorder for a few years as a deepening writer’s block prevented me from putting hands to keyboard, I finally churned out a draft that I could tolerate only to receive a return email from my publisher letting me know that they were unable to go ahead.

The announcement that they were closing came the next day.

Crushed, I turned to academia only for the review committee to tell me that the plot was a trope. Drunkenly at a dinner party, a friend who was an avid reader of science fiction leveled a similar criticism.

Like Judas betraying his master, so I turned away from my manuscript, that bright spirit who so trusted me to birth her into the world.

“Please put it away and don’t speak of it again,” I wrote to my pen friend.

I used basic cover art and self-published it at $0.00 on Kindle.

But, to misquote Mervyn Peake, speaking of the lovemaking of Titus and Juno, it was “not to create the deed that should set glory in motion, but to bring glory to an end. To stab sweet love, to stab it to death. To be free of it.”

Farewell, friend. Sleep well.

Interestingly, everything I wrote about social media manipulation and surveillance capitalism did happen in the decade following its publication. Life plagiarising art.

But, if a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?

10 years after I first published Letters to the Black Underground, fellow dreampunk author Cliff Jones Jnr. picked it up and he heard what I was saying.

Cliff commissioned me to author some short stories for two anthologies he compiled and edited through Fractured Mirror publishing, Mirrormaze and Somniscope.

I stopped writing because I needed people around me who could coax the words out of me.

Reason 4: I stopped writing because writers of wyrd fiction are not employable by multinational corporations

I stopped writing because the bottomless grief of one displaced from their people and country engulfed me.

When my husband and I moved to England, a strange thing happened: within a few days of stepping off the airplane I developed a thick South London accent.

“I’m not putting it on I swear!” I said to my sister over the phone.

It went back to normal after a week or two, but a more holistic form of me took years to coalesce.

Confronted with the reality of this new employment market, I stopped writing so I could focus on my CV and LinkedIn bio, endlessly editing role descriptions and taglines in an attempt at conveying the essence of my skill set and experience.

Y’ael V: Writer of dystopian tropes & thought leader in personal brand destruction | Crafting forgettable and pretentious copy for cheap cheap

Employment Experience

2011-2021: Failed Author | Various Publications

• Toiled in obscurity for +10 years

• Spearheaded social media campaigns that amassed -0.00 followers across zero geographies

• Alienated +3 major publications with unique blend of acerbic humour and unnecessary sarcasm

And so on.

It was easier just to omit the whole thing than to develop a narrative that would seem relevant to an applicant tracking system.

Yes, I stopped writing because I lost faith in my ability to write worthwhile fiction, and I went into survival mode because I needed to pay the bills while avoiding drowning in the trauma and grief that followed leaving my family.

And, when I did get a contract job with a big corporate, I needed to pay attention and make an impression so that I could remain employed and we could make it in this new country.

But, this was only part of the story.

It is no secret that I hate social media. I just know too much about how its nefarious architectures interface with the human condition.

I deleted Facebook and only keep Instagram going so I can see what my friends and family are up to. I (Yelena) am doing the opposite of building a following on Instagram, only allowing people I know to follow me.

Having pursued a curated front so thoroughly through the Gonzo era, my level of cynicism is exceedingly high, and my appetite for posturing is correspondingly low. I cannot bear the thought of creating Instagram stories to promote myself or my writing process or any other form of systematised distortion for the purposes of marketing or ego fulfillment. I just can’t take it seriously, can’t take myself so seriously, knowing how much of an idiot I am, and we all are. It is fake shit. Fakest.

This awareness, coupled with an ambivalent relationship to the moniker itself, has quite effectively silenced Yelena to the public.

But LinkedIn is another matter entirely. I do have over 1000 connections and climbing, but the shape of the network is such that any voice will alienate some part of the network.

It is a professional networking tool, so I have many connections from tech in financial services that I have worked with over the last decade. I can’t post anything about this topic because the dialogue is divorced from the broader context and any commentary on this will be a violation of the company’s social media policy. Nothing worth saying otherwise. Furthermore, entering conversations about these externalities or about regenerative work while employed by a multinational is an odd and hypocritical juxtaposition.

Enter the Yelena proposition again. After the Gonzo phase, Yelena continued to give me the freedom to express myself without putting my day job at risk.

But at what cost?

I can’t comment on the topics I care about on LinkedIn using Yelena’s voice, because it does not belong on that platform and I can’t risk the two worlds bleeding into one another. I don’t want recruiters from a potential employer stumbling across my fiction and reading bizarre poems about eagles etc.

My writing is a Swiss Army Knife that fans out to reveal a multitude of strange implements: a spiral bone for boring into deep time, a wide, flat spoon made of an oyster shell for dipping into the collective unconscious, an opal talisman that connects to the heart of innocence. You could flip the knife open 1000 times and never find the same device twice, so there are no applications for project management.

Similarly, Yelena’s covert ties to organised finance erode her credibility as a polemicist. Images of Dilbert popping up in a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, or Haruki Murakami come to mind. A bland, two-dimensional pencil drawing of an IT manager standing out starkly against a rain forest curtain of jaguars and ferns.

Creatively, the result is that I feel muzzled and caged, caught between two partial expressions that never meet.

I stopped writing because I faced a Catch 22 on the only platform I use.

At first, I thought the only solution was either to get a more open-minded employer or to start hanging out somewhere else.

I realised that a more authentic course of action is to take the ultimate risk: to write as my true Self, write for my kin, and share my writing where they can find it and receive it as intended.

My closest kin of course do not call me Yelena or even by my full name, Y’ael. They call me by a sweet diminutive that softens all my edges, dulls the barbs, and allows me to respond as myself.

They call me Ayla.

This is my real name.

It is the name of the one living in the deepest keeps of the citadel, driven underground by the criticism, mockery, bullying, and abuse I have received during my life.

It is ultimate vulnerability.

It is a risk to give away such a name, but I know the alternative and it is to bury the moon, to hide the light.

Goodbye, Yelena Calavera. Goodnight.

Reason 5: I didn’t stop writing

I stopped writing, but I didn’t really stop writing.

I just needed to go to my room and think about what I had done.

The truth is, I had not been entirely honest with myself about who I was and why I was publishing material.

As a result, what I wrote was not coming from the unedited place it needed to come from to withstand all the setbacks and criticisms I met along the way. Instead, these just served to fuel an insidious feeling that I was a phony and deserved to be deplatformed by a faceless audience of intellectual and moral judges.

When I really write instead of just playing at writing, I write from my uniquely fractured place in the cosmos, as an educated neurodivergent, queer(ish) white woman brought up in the last middle-class suburban splutters of the wretched Apartheid mentality that gave birth to such an unequal South African society, and as an immigrant to this country.

I am the survivor of trauma and abuse, an exile within musical, literary, and film sub-cultures within the tentacular counterculture that resists the Overculture.

As such, while I have been marginalised, I am the descendant of colonisers. My thinking has been thoroughly colonised and so awarded all its violent privileges and their correlative normativities and constraints.

I stopped writing because I needed to examine these.

Perhaps I wrote dystopian stories because on some level I knew that these polarised identities were meta-stable and ultimately doomed.

It was easier to contrive thin apocalypses than to write about my own grief, shame, vulnerability, and complicity.

These are volatile ingredients to combine within a narrative.

The resultant works would be so controversial, naked, and absurd as to lead to ridicule, to being stalked by a creep, threatened, and possibly killed or worse, to being cancelled on Twitter by a mob of people on the same ‘side.’

The terror silenced me.

But becoming a wife and a parent has changed me. I have understood that I must not let these fears stop me from writing — from living — because I will then teach my family to live as if dreams cannot be trusted.

I stopped writing, or rather I stopped writing pop lyrics and stopped accepting money for my published work, so that I could start writing for the right reasons.

I stopped writing because I don’t think I ever started writing in the first place.

Before I ever tried to write, I just gave my hands over to the dreams and they did the rest.