How Can We Bear Our Own Legacy

Change is the only constant. Eric and David reflect on creative legacy, the struggles of maintaining objects, and all the things we wish we were, but aren't quite. What do we do when we realise time has her hand in our wallet, taking everything you own, one five dollar note at a time?

D.C. McNeill: Eric, we live in precarious times: I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. This is for myriad reasons: the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the rise of fascism in America, and most keenly the fact that I am not dealing with my thirties… particularly well. I released my first shitty novel at nineteen and my first real novel was published at twenty-three. That was… a while ago now. This has me thinking about time and those big, scary choices that feel like things other people do: adult stuff. I bought my apartment in 2022 and I’m already looking at upgrading to a townhouse / a nicer apartment in no small part because the Olympics are coming to Brisbane and we’re all desperately trying to outpace the subsequent economic collapse.

More procedurally, something I really struggle with is some simple executive tasks because of my depression. My shower grout is worn down: I need to go to the hardware store and buy silicon. I drove over a nail and need to take my tire in for repair. The balcony needs a power clean. It all goes on the backburner. Not because I lack the time (I don’t have 3 kids, a job, and a wife studying like you) it’s just not something I can do without a companion. One of my closest friends Lucy is a therapist and she calls this paired behaviour. The avoidance is mostly harmless, but occasionally gets me in avoidable trouble. Last night I accidentally fudged a password reset on my recording PC because I’d been putting it off for weeks, and I had to stay up til one in the morning fixing it. I do not recommend this.

As I get older, I’m struck by how much my thinking about time and death has changed and how small these annoyances I seem unable to resolve really are. I find myself instead focused on writing and reading as much as possible, while seeking out activities in the real world: they’ve made public transport 50 cents where I live so the barrier to slinging a laptop in my bag and hopping on the bus is lower than it’s ever been. To say nothing of the convenience of being able to have ice cold beers and enjoy the last few weeks of perfect weather in Brisbane before it gets hot again… I sometimes think about my last beer.

I love beer. I think about the (if we don’t burn our planet into a ruinous hellscape in the next decade) conversation in a doctor’s office where they tell me that I have to give up drinking to extend my life. I wonder if I’ll even want to do that. Either way, there will be a last beer. A last book I publish. A last podcast I record. A last… well, you get the idea. It is within this reflection that I think very often about the ecology of my life. I wonder if I’ll remember my incredibly annoying neighbours across the road who are incapable of shutting up for five minutes. I wonder if the irritation I feel at how long it’s taken me to donate a few bags of clothes to goodwill will be resonant all those years later. I suspect not. I suspect I will recall my favourite restaurants. My favourite work colleagues. My favourite books. My favourite experiences. And, probably, my favourite beers: shout out Range Brewing, Aether and Happy Valley. The corollary, too: what will I be remembered for? By readers. By audience. By colleagues.

I’m curious if legacy and memory is something you think about often. And if it is, how your relationship has changed as you’ve grown older (and, in theory, wiser).

E.S. Anderson: David, bold to begin this letter series with a simple, “But what about death, then?” But, death, or legacy, has definitely been close to mind these last few months, for the global reasons you described, and some very personal to me. I lost my mother, age 67, in 2024, and my aunt, age 80, this year. I have seen my father navigate the passing of his brother-in-law, his father-in-law, his father, his mother, his wife, and his sister, in a span of 25 years. Our family has gotten “good” at death.

Artists probably consider their legacy more than average. It comes with the work, which we hope will outlast us. To some, this comes packaged with the burden of considering what future generations will think. I believe that there are only a few ways to react to death: fear and reclusion, carpe diem, or a Hamlet-esque revenge plot. Thankfully, unless I decide to spend the rest of my life in a war against cancer, I have only to choose between the first two. This leads to the binary struggle inherent in all human decisions: safety/excitement, security/growth, comfort/adventure, fear/wonder. The Garden or the Field. Tatooine or Space. The Hobbit-hole or the Misty Mountain. Having children meant that I had to begin making these decisions with regard not only for myself, but those under my care. I am now responsible for the development of tiny humans that need a balance of comfort and discomfort to become happy and capable adults. We may make decisions soon that will make us all very uncomfortable for quite a while, in exchange for greater fulfillment and joy.

I offer a reframe to your frustrations with “adulting.” Societally, people are expected to care for their stuff, and stuff falls apart. A home needs repairs, a car needs new tires (I write this from the waiting room of my local shop). And when those things break, it shows what our priorities are. I have coworkers that see their cars and homes as extensions of themselves. A dirty car infers a negligent driver; cracked grout infers a cracked resident. But for some, these moments bring clarity for what we personally prioritize, societal norms be damned. I drove for years with missing hubcaps, because for me, the time/money cost was greater than the benefit. Some have a much lower threshold, some a much higher.

When I was in grad school, I attended a talk by Jorge Cham, author and artist of Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) Webcomic. Caged in humor and a relevance to grad-student life was one basic life lesson: the enemy of joy is not hard work, long hours, or strict academic advisors. The enemy of joy is Guilt. We feel guilty when we take extra time for work, and can’t go out with friends. We feel guilty taking a long phone call with family because it puts us behind on our to-do list. Those who live joyful lives do so because they are able to appreciate every moment achieved without regretting the moments lost. It is important to recognize that these priorities can change, quickly and drastically, or slowly, with time and age. The garden I kept for years is filled with weeds, but I have a new baby and a finished novel in rewrites. I wouldn’t trade those for tomatoes any sooner than Bilbo would trade his adventures for those lost spoons.

I was just informed that it will take two more hours to fix my vehicle. I could dwell on the “work” I’m unable to do from the waiting room. Instead, I’m writing to you and thinking about death. And instead of feeling guilty, I am thankful for this opportunity to pause and work on something I enjoy.

D.C. McNeill: Guilt is an emotion I have spent the past five years trying to grow away from (not out of). Through the writing of Palerunner, a book of video game essays shot through with a catastrophic break-up, I arrived on the other side with a cautious lack of guilt. I love spending hours and hours studying genre fiction, talking about that into a microphone, and hours editing that into a podcast I am proud of. Yet I am no perfectionist. I am a just-good-enough-ist, I am just fortunate that my good enough is honed by years of practice and training, and I let my mistakes go without prejudice. A hard won skill that occasionally falters.

The guilt you describe is, in my opinion, a through-put of a capitalist economical concept that any econ-101 student is familiar with: opportunity cost. The notion that if you are doing A, you are missing out on any hundred/thousand other things you could be doing. Which is, of course, nonsense. Each of us exist within a web of context that push and pull us in, as you say, drastic and small ways. We are not free moving Newtonian objects that could just do something else.

On your note of these priorities changing with time, an anecdote: I recently visited my family in the UK. We are not close. These are strangers for the most part. With the exception of grandmother, Maureen, and my cousin, Charlie. My grandmother is 92. I am certain that this year is the last time I will speak with her. The last time my behaviour irritates and confuses her. The last time I cook for her. The last time my Aunties complain about her fussiness. I have never had a good relationship with my grandmother: my Mum, my brother and I are the black sheeps of the family. I feel no regret or guilt over this relationship, yet, having spent a night in London drinking with my cousin Charlie, I find myself flooded with guilt and nostalgia. A guilt that I have lived this great big rich life and she has not been a part of it. That, I think, is where my regrets tend to nest and multiply. Not in carving out time for edits or writing sessions or personal space, but in realising I have accidentally gone without someone I love for no particular reason other than time and space and life. We are all parallel lines on a graph, and I regret that I allowed my line to stop intersecting with this person’s line. When we hugged at the train station we pulled our bodies together as if we might impart some permanent imprint on each other, some small piece of the other to carry forever. I like to think we did.

The guilt, I think, also resides in the lies about productivity people use to sell self-help books about maximising your time so, you guessed it, you can do more labour to produce more excess capital: this being the only true metric that many measure their time with. I recall a third year writing seminar where the formidable Dr Kari Gislason asked a class of four hundred students who would consider self-publishing. A silence enveloped the lecture theatre. I raised my hand very slowly indeed, trying to catch the eyes of my fellow writers, looking for support. The beacons are lit, David calls for aid! Two students answered the call and raised their hands. Dr Gislason asked the other students why they had not raised their hands. Would it be so bad? Dr Gislason asked.

But how would we get paid, one student replied, and I swear Dr Gislason never looked at that student the same way ever again.

E.S. Anderson: David, I had a similar experience in my first year at university. I was in a Western Civilization class and the professor, knowing that most of us were in our first semester in higher education, asked us “why are you here? Is it for money? To earn a high-paying job?” Several raised their hands. “Is it because your friends and family told you to and you had no better options?” A few raised their hands. “Maybe you know that this is the best place to find a spouse and you don’t plan on using this degree at all?” Two very honest girls raised their hands. By the end of it, I was the only person in the class without my hand up, and he asked me, “why are you here?” Having never put much thought into it, I said “I’m looking for a job I enjoy so much I would do it for free.” He grinned, called me an idealist, and moved on. He should have added “naive.”

Now twenty years later, I am not working a job I love so much I would do it for free. I enjoy the work and the freedoms it provides, but would give it up immediately if a better option came along. The interesting thing is, I could have chosen otherwise. We used to joke that I’d be living in my friends’ basements after graduation because they were all going to get real jobs. But at some point along the way, the idea of being a starving artist became unappealing. Some may consider it a weakness, but when I saw an easier path to self-sufficiency, I took it.

I have had major internal and external debates about “art for the sake of art” or what work I put myself through if I’m not going to “get something out of it.” My side-hustles, my hobbies, are all done without the promise of immediate compensation, but in the back of my mind I can justify the work as a part of building my audience, my portfolio, my connections, and my skillset. I have not been able to embrace the idea that I am creating for my own enjoyment. I must have an audience in mind to feel legitimate, a path to publication to justify the words on the page. I sometimes wonder if this is healthy, or if it is just the way I am wired.

Several years ago, we had some family members move to the other side of the country. It came suddenly and without proper farewells or explanations. Bitterness festered. Ties were cut. Suddenly, we had to balance how close we actually felt to these people with how much work it would be to visit them, or to sustain awkward phone conversations, letter writing, etc.  The funny thing about it is, we have other friends and family that live just as far away, if not further. We hold no bitterness towards them and consider it a special treat when we are able to meet in person. This realization rearranged our entire approach to those we pursue for relationship and the guilt we feel when we let some of those relationships go. We had to rethink our definition of relationship.

I’m currently at a writer’s conference in Atlanta and attended a talk on “Writing with a Full Time Job.” The room was filled with marketing managers and teachers and cardiologists who are struggling to write on weekends, in free minutes between patients, or during their long commute. The crux of the talk was that we needed to reevaluate our definition of success. Some want to win awards. Some only want to see their books in print. Some only want to finish a project. If I can push out a novel every 3-4 years, along with random articles, poems, podcasts, and other projects, that is far better than not writing at all. And if the writing I am able to do finds success that leads to publication, fame, and fortune–so be it. I will write, no matter what, just as I will visit those important to me, no matter what. And I must leave myself open to reframing what, and who, are current priorities in my life.

D.C. McNeill: Funny, I was the friend in my writing degree who had the real job, and frequently the person who paid for beers, dinner, and often attracted couch surfers for various periods of time.

You raise a problem at the nadir of every creative unlucky enough or untalented enough to be an Alan Moore or a Sarah J. Mass or a Stephen King: we artists who fell through the cracks and now live beneath the surface of the culture. On this note, a confession: I originally started the Art For Artists podcast to promote my writing. That podcast expanded into Digital & Creative Media Works, and it took the cracking of that company to free me of that motivation. I find myself so grateful for ZeroIndent, and the absolute willingness of my colleagues to do big, large creative work just for the sake of doing it, and because it is fun. I vividly recall the ending of our Daredevil unit where it occurred to me and Pat just how much doing the work had changed us. While we make work, our work makes us, too. This is why I will always write novels. Articles. This is why I will always find new and emergent reasons to speak into a microphone about something I have thought about very deeply. My life is better for doing this work with people I love working with. The audience is a nice side benefit, isn’t it?

I’m reminded here of a conversation I had with my old Engineering Manager some four years ago. We were sitting in the office--which at that time overlooked the Storey Bridge and the curve of the Brisbane river--sipping beers and watching the sunset. We’d just been through a gruelling client go-live, and all I could think about was going home for a cold shower and a whisky. He’s a huge science fiction fan, so we got to talking about Maynard Trigg, and he asked, in his very direct way, how the hell I find the time to write, alongside work, podcasting, socialising and so on. I’d never actually been asked that before, and I tried to figure it out. The answer, I explained, is that I just sort of do. But the real answer is that creative work is like any work: you simply have to sit in front of the computer and do the damn thing. Even if you do the thing for ten minutes. That’s ten minutes more than nothing.

As you say, if we could wave a magic wand and become fiscally successful authors tomorrow, we would both do it. Yet there is a delicious freedom in running my own independent publisher. UnderInk lets me do things the big three never would, like sell secret Novellas to frequent customers or publish Palerunner, a completely non-commercially viable book of essays. The few times videos or projects escape containment of my core audience, I am always disappointed by the comments from the masses. I can only imagine how that must go for a famous author, so I find myself torn between wanting that success, and getting that success on my own terms. Getting it isn’t getting it if you don’t get it how you want, I think. But then who am I to judge? Chris Nolan made Batman to unlock unlimited money for his films for the rest of his career. Brandon Sanderson wrote Wheel of Time to catapult his Final Empire series into the stratosphere.

I posit then, it is a brave thing indeed to change how you define success. When we draw a line and say “for me, this matters” we wage war against cynicism. To believe in the work is no neutral position: each word puts the devil back in his hole, just a little more each time.

E.S. Anderson: David, since your first message, I had a moment of transcendence that I think captures these thoughts perfectly. I also had a large bag to donate to Goodwill. It was filled with toys my kids either never played with or ones I couldn't stand to hear any longer. It was in my car for a long time. Every day, I felt guilt when I saw it. A bit of a failure. How couldn't I find the 2 minutes it would take to do this simple task? Then my office participated in a volunteer project for a boy's foster care camp. They needed landscaping, furniture moving, cleaning, organizing, etc. It was very fulfilling work. And after it was over, I realized I had a bag of toys in my car. When I showed it to the staff, they were immediately able to name the boys that would appreciate every single toy. Often, these kids come with nothing, fleeing horrible circumstances, and the camp is only able to supply so much. We were all in tears by the end.

Not every recurring guilt will end so well, but I took these thoughts away: I could have just thrown those toys away. Added them to a landfill. My basic desire to do good resulted in me accidentally doing more good than I ever expected. Call it divine intervention, serendipity, kismet. I call it planting seeds we may never see grow. If I leave my door open at work so my team can come talk to me, I'll get a lot of distractions and annoyances. But I'll also get opportunities for human connection, better workplace morale, and a team I can count on when I'm the one who needs help. I take meetings with people that will have no affect on my sales goals, merely because they are lonely or need help, or because I don't want them to bother my employees. And maybe 1 of 4 times, my actions reap benefits.

Once, while I was on a ridiculous side-quest,  I needed a stranger's help to park my professor's truck in a parking garage in Atlanta. Then my good Samaritan disappeared. She didn't even wait for me to open my door so I could thank her. My thanks were completely unnecessary and her good deed needed no justification. Her legacy is that I now try to stop to help strangers back into tricky spots.

I believe that, at best, my legacy is the trail of deeds left in the wake of my life. If I have lived well, it will be impossible to trace the ripples. At worst, my legacy is my last good deed. If nothing else, I can still see those closest lines, and concentrate on dropping one more good thing into the world.

D.C. McNeill: This is a tricky thing to articulate, but I think that so often we are willing to attribute those moments of kismet to fate, or some divine coincidence. The truth that we all have to adjust to eventually is that we are fleshy objects with mass that move through and interface with a material reality. This is one of those bone rattling truths that I think of when I consider legacy. Sometimes, I think that my life will be the objects I leave behind to my family, or perhaps if I somehow outlive my brother, a marathon runner, the objects I burden Patrick with. To this end, I am obsessed with owning the least amount of stuff, and instead concerned, like you, with the amount of ripples I can produce in the universe.

Sometimes it feels like we are ghost stories, waiting to happen. Idea for a ghost story: a great writer becomes a great writer while working as a Sales Director, only to die never achieving fame as an author. Idea for a ghost story: a mediocre writer spends their entire life talking about storytelling and running an independent publishing company, only to die never achieving fame as an author.

E.S. Anderson is the co-host of Diamonds in the Rough Draft podcast and author of Science-Fiction/Fantasy titles for children and young adults.

Cover photo by Wallace Chuck: https://www.pexels.com/photo/round-silver-colored-pocket-watch-and-eyeglasses-on-opened-book-3109167/