My new collection Over Her Knee comes out on Friday! Pre-order your copy now!

As I mentioned in recent weeks, I’m working on a non-erotica sci-fi novel. It was going along at a pretty good clip — I was on Draft 4, and had gotten through about 65,000 words of it (23 chapters out of 44).

Then I got to chapter 24, which required significant rewriting. Like, way more than any other chapter I’ve done to this point.

As we speak, I have the window with chapter 24 open, halfway done, and I just keep staring at it, not really wanting to work on it.

I know why: because unlike the previous 23 chapters, I have to make substantive changes to this one that could affect the 20 chapters that follow it. The more changes I make to this chapter, the more changes I have to make to future chapters. It means more work, more writing, more intense concentration, and less “oh, this was easy to fix, let me just change this little bit here and zoom along.”

When writing comes easy, it’s great. It feels amazing to get those words down on the page. But when it’s hard, it’s really hard. And daunting, too; just the thought of what I have to do is making me not want to write any more of Draft 4. I mean, I’m going to, eventually, but my process has pretty much ground to a halt. Worse, I feel stuck when it comes to working on anything else; I don’t want to lose the data in my mind about this book, and I don’t want to overwrite it with other data which will then lead to Draft 5 being more complex (because of the whole square brackets thing). Even now, instead of writing more of chapter 24, I’m procrastinating by writing this blog post. I have plenty of time today (I’m writing this a few days in advance) but I know I’m not going to work on the chapter. I’ll find literally anything I can to avoid doing it.

I wish I had the self-discipline to get past these thoughts and just write the damn words, but I’m not built that way. Maybe if writing was my only job I would pull it off, but that seems unlikely to ever happen. So I procrastinate until I reach a tipping point, and then I write, and I wonder what I was procrastinating about in the first place.

For now, I’m stuck in that awkward moment.