Guess how much writing I got done over the Thanksgiving week, when I had nothing to do at work most of the time. 

Guess how much writing I got done the Monday after Thanksgiving, when I had very little to do at work. 

Guess how much writing I got done the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when I had even less to do. 

If you guessed “none”, you’d be correct. 

I don’t get it. I have all this time, and until December 8 I didn’t have my boss looking over my shoulder (he’s been working remotely but he got back to the office on the 8th). It should have been easy to write something. Anything. 

But all I did was sit and stare at my screen, ideas running through my head but none of them developed enough for a story that I haven’t already told. 

Sure, erotica is often a bastion of familiarity — people who read certain types of it tend to want to read more of that and less of something else. It’s why you get long serieses of Blanked by the Blanky Blank (Captured by the Billionaire CEO, Owned by the Biker Gang Leader, Bred by the Alpha Werewolf, etc.). I mean, sure, the readers could be invested in the characters (the reason I keep buying Laurell K. Hamilton‘s books despite the fact that they’re so bogged-down with characters and interrelationships that there’s no room anywhere for any action), but they’re buying erotica. The main action in an erotica book is the sex itself. 

Writing the same thing over and over, though, doesn’t appeal to me. I could write dozens of the same types of spanking stories, changing just the characters and the setting slightly enough to make them different. Hell, it works for Chuck Tingle (he changes the first 2500 words or so of every Tingler, but in all the ones I’ve read the sex is basically the same). My concern with that is then something I love will become a job — I’ll stop looking forward to writing stories because they’ll all be the same story. That’s not what I want. I want to tell different stories, maybe with the same characters and maybe with new ones. It’s why the GWWA book appealed to me so much while I was writing it. It’s why I enjoyed when I was on a roll during the writing process of Holiday Heat. It’s why I was able to write Dreaming of How it Was Going to Be in two weeks. They were all different stories, and I was excited about writing them. 

I just haven’t been excited about writing lately, I guess. It’s not a job, not yet, but when I look at that blank page no stories come to mind that I really want to tell. I’m this close to finishing the Lizzie book — I just need one more chapter that’s at least 7500 words long — but the plot of that final chapter continues to elude me. MGOC hit a wall and I don’t know if I’ll go back to it or not. 

Maybe I’ll come up with a new idea and get excited about it. That, I think, would be the best solution to my writer’s block. But until that happens, you can guess how much writing I’ll be doing.