You see, while I labored away, sweat glistening on my brow, Sony was skulking in dark alleyways with naught but evil in her heart. Unbeknownst to me, the digital whore was busy hawking its PC game division like a street vendor selling knock-off watches. In 2015, the dastardly deed was done. Daybreak dawned, a new player on the scene of online PC games.

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​And when Daybreak, fresh off burning through their coffers to acquire Sony Online Entertainment, gazed upon our humble abode of EverQuest Next, they saw naught but half-finished tapestries and looming deadlines. They eyed the massive 325-million-dollar mountain of cash still needed to see our hard work come to market like Ebenezer Scrooge himself reborn. Their verdict? Bah, humbug! No encore for us. It was like getting halfway through a jaw-dropping novel, only to find the remaining pages blank. A crime, I say. But what could be done about it?

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​I bade farewell to my Sony family, mournful and somber, broken by the loss of the sanctuary that had become my creative crucible for three long years. My bright future crushed but not forgotten, yet still a graveyard of digital phantasms, none the less.

 

I found myself in 2015; the year that would become the crucible of my undoing. I fell into a hole so dark, I nearly forgot what the sun even looked like. In 2008 I'd been a go-getter. A deadline-slayer. And now I had morphed into someone unrecognizable. Deadlines slipped through my fingers like grains of sand. Motivation became a scarce commodity, rarer than a blue moon. And my focus as a writer vanished into mist.

 

On paper, it all made sense of course. The EverQuest Next ship had sunk, its crew cut and dispersed. Would not your own morale be swimming with the sharks? I chalked it up to the gut-punch that was EQNext's demise. I told myself this funk was a product of those grim days, and nothing more. Surely, my spirits would lift, and I'd return to normal once I distanced myself from this disaster. Time heals all wounds, does it not?

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Apparently in my case: no it doesn't.

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For me, the spiral didn't stop. I kept sinking, plunging into abyssal depths I'd never known. Depression, you might think. Yet those who know me would rebut such a diagnosis. I'm the guy who spews infectiously optimistic one-liners that make others want to puke. I say sickening things like, “I’ve never failed at anything in my life. I’ve simply had thousands of opportunities to learn how not to do something.” Yet here I was, in the eye of a storm I couldn't wish away.

 

The years stretched on, each more indistinguishable from the last. 2015 turned into 2016 which rolled into 2017 and before I knew it, it was 2018… and I had written nothing. My creative well had run dry. Oh sure, I penned the first two books in my Brutal Writing Advice series. But that's like a chef saying he cooked when all he did was reheat yesterday's meatloaf. These weren't the rich tapestries of fiction I was used to weaving; they were cut-and-paste pieces of advice I'd been spouting for over a decade. Critically acclaimed advice, to be sure. But my heart belongs to fiction, and these tributes to the world left me unfulfilled. I did manage to write a handful of short stories during this time. Torturous slogs through creative quicksand. Months-long battles for a few measly thousand words. A grim shadow of my past prolific 60,000-word months.

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​I hated to do it, but eventually I had to admit I was grappling with the black dog of chronic depression. But let me peel back another layer of this onion that is the bearing of my very soul for your pleasure. I'm straight-edged. A guy who sidesteps any substance that clouds the mind. Alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, I'll pass. But there is one thing I fear far above any of those vices: Anti-depressants. In high school I had a best friend, an honor roll student, video game geek, and D&D nerd. A man after my own heart. When he was sixteen, his overzealous mother put him on meds for some absurd reason. I think he might have smirked at her the wrong way one day and she freaked out thinking he’d become the next Jack the Ripper. My younger self watched in horror as my friend transform. He lost his spark, his intelligence, his sanity. It was like witnessing a slow-motion train wreck with bodies being ripped apart like rag dolls. A jarring spectacle that left deep scars on my impressionable young psyche.

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Last I heard, he'd checked himself into a mental facility. Again.

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Which is why I couldn't force myself to seek the help I so clearly needed. I was too much the coward. Besides, I was raised in the “rub some dirt on it and you’ll be fine” era. If I just sucked it up and pushed through, I'd be fine.

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Yeah… how’d that work out for me?

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And then it happened.

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The wake-up call punched me in the face in 2019. A convention dialed me up, offering the limelight as their Author Guest of Honor. Flattered, I said yes. Yet, as the line went dead, a biting truth gnawed at my mind. My neighbor, a man whose vocation is selling used cars, could fill that honored seat as aptly as me. I mean, his novel output matched mine, did it not. Zilch, nada, zero. Nothing since 2015. Nay! I had to be honest. Naught since Mortals & Deities in 2010, as far as my fans knew! What a damning scorecard.

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So, there it was. The slap in the face I needed, urging me to make a move. I mulled over the dreaded anti-depressants and realized, if they did turn my brain into mush, what did it matter? As painful as the reality was, I had to face the facts: I was no longer a novelist. My career had died and I simply refused to come to terms with it.

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And here we reach the mid ACT II climax, changing the course of the adventure. Turns out I wasn't depressed at all. Not in the textbook sense, at least. What I assumed was a bout of chronic depression was something more tangible. My body had decided to clock out on hormone production. Yes, those unsung heroes of biological balance had exited stage left. Important little critters, as it happens. Who would've guessed? Not me.

 

Testosterone was my main nemesis. That elusive elixir governing the male brain, it appears, can make or break a man's mental health. An absence of it and your memory drifts into a fog, your focus dissolves, and along with it, your basic will to live. It's why I refer to the years between 2015 and 2019 as my "waking coma" years. They are little more than a gray haze of memories and milestones. Half-a-decade of eroded joy, dismantling the core of who I was. The most painful part of that era was not the death of my career, however. It was the fact that I’d been an absent father to my children, my wife a widow even as she slept next to the shell of a man she’d married. Years I’ll never recover.

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Just so you have a factual account, let me give you the numbers. A young lad in his 20s boasts a testosterone level ranging from 700 to 900. Reach my vintage age and for most, that number dwindles to a still respectable 500 to 600. However, cross the threshold below 300, and it's time for supplementation lest you suffer the consequences. Descend to a paltry 150, and you've hit the ominous realm of "chronically low." For perspective, women, who naturally have less of the stuff, average between 30 and 60.

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My count was not chronically low, but virtually nonexistent. How much so?

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Seven.

 

Yes. My endocrine system had essentially taken a sabbatical, leaving me a hollow husk navigating a discolored world through a veil of muted apathy.

 

The why behind my hormone plunge remains elusive. A scientific blind spot, if you will. While the medical world has lavished billions in the attempt to understand the labyrinthine maze that is women's hormones. Deserved, no doubt. The study of men's hormones remains an underfunded wasteland of ignorance.

 

And yet the miracle of modern medicine prevails.

 

A weekly jab in the ass and voilà! My muse returned. Not meekly but in a blazing spectacle. My mind resurrected, words once again flowed from me like a river breaking through a dam. But it wasn't just prose that was summoned to my keyboard; creativity burst forth in manifold ways. A TV series inked, an award-winning children's script penned, another guide into the treacherous realm of creative writing available to hungry fans. Each a feather in my suddenly not-so-sluggish cap.

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Yet through it all, my gaze returned to my first love—my Genesis Saga. The title now more ironic than ever. But that still doesn't answer the question posed in the title of this essay so long, long ago. Why have I done a complete rewrite of an award-winning novel?

 

While I had no ability to write fiction during this time, I still taught creative writing all over the world. And though the drive to produce was beyond my grasp, my mind toiled on the subject endlessly. And time doesn't just age wine and cheese; it hones skills, sharpens instincts. My first book is now little more than a youthful endeavor to me, filled with passion but lacking the finesse of years spent wrestling with prose. I had no desire to put a roof on such a weak foundation, award-winning or not!

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So, I tore it down to its bones and began anew, breathing life into something familiar yet profoundly changed. For I was not the same man I was then, either.

 

As my momentum gathered beneath the wings of creativity, each keystroke sounded like a hymn from a celestial choir. A story reborn, almost doubled in volume. I was adding entirely new landscapes to the world I'd already created. Additional and expanded chapters, reworked plot elements, even a new character arc, deep and conflicted, found their voice and role within my epic. A story once capped at 136,000 words now sprawled across 240,000—an expansive canvas of nuance, tension, and renewed vigor.

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I morphed into a whirlwind of creation, like a god intoxicated by the very act of world-building. Words flowed, stories became enriched, and plots honed to razor sharpness. As I toiled to bring the manuscript to new heights, it became a symphony nearing its crescendo, each note precisely where it needed to be.

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But just when the ink should have been drying on my new chapter of triumph, I was reminded that before the climax of a story, the hero must pass through the ultimate darkness: the all hope is lost moment. The period at the end of a sentence no one wants to write. Just one word, yet it demanded to be included in my story.

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Cancer.

 

The treatment was a journey through desolate lands, where pain reigned, and resilience wavered on a knife's edge. Every ounce of poison that invaded my veins spoke of a deadly gamble—a bet on which killer would claim victory first, the one within or the one administered from without. Months of this uncertainty built an odd cadence, each treatment a morbid stanza in an epic poem.

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In a twist of ironic sweetness, they injected me with radioactive sugar. A bitter confection, soaked in uncertainty and strained thought a piercing needle. The narrow tube used for discovery became a tunnel to an undefined future, a tight passage through the eye of fate's storm.

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Each radioactive beam shot into my body was like some cruel brush wielded by a madman painting a grotesque caricature of a human being. The tableau was paradoxical; this alchemy that aimed to heal my illness was killing me day by day.

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Weight vanished from my body like leaves torn from a once robust tree, shedding with each passing season of chemotherapy and radiation. The scale ticked ever downward—190, 180, 170, more. A dwindling series until it halted at a ghostly 140. Emaciation wore my form like a macabre cloak. But in the end, I remained... the tumor did not.

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Recovery has been no small hill to climb, but my body inches back. Life clawing its way through the mud of misery. Through it all, my optimistic demeanor never flickered out. Each new, horrific experience became less a scar and more a tapestry of life's intricate complexities. A dark thread woven into a greater narrative, adding depth and breadth to my understanding of what it means to be human.