As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been using what little time I have at work during breaks to write my sci-fi choose-your-own-adventure novel. I had a couple of additional thoughts on the matter.

I was in one of the writing discords to which I belong and someone mentioned that writing a CYOA might not be good for their ADHD. I beg to differ; with CYOA, you can jump around. If you get bored or distracted writing one storyline, you can move to another one. There are 158 “pages” in this novel, and I haven’t written them in any sort of order. I bounce around: sometimes we’re on one starship and sometimes we’re on another; sometimes we’re on a space station and sometimes we’re on a planet; sometimes we carry weapons and sometimes we don’t. Whatever I feel like writing at the time is what I write. I don’t have ADHD (or, at least, I’m not diagnosed with it, but I don’t think I have it), but I can imagine how someone who doesn’t have a long attention span could benefit from writing CYOA.

My other thought: I wonder if I get so much more writing done on this novel because, on work days, I don’t have other things to distract me. When I’m at home, I use my what-would-be-commuting-time for marketing, writing blog posts, updating social media, and searching for new jobs. By the time I’ve finished all of that, I don’t have enough energy left to be creative, so I don’t end up writing fiction. At work, though, I can’t write blog posts for a NSFW blog, I can’t update Fetlife, I can’t do marketing work, and I certainly can’t write spanking fiction. I guess that means I should probably do the writing first, and then do the other stuff, but I also have a specific order to the way I like to do things, and this is it. I’ve tried to change and it’s just made me uncomfortable, and not in a good way.