Yup, you guessed it: it’s another post bemoaning my “inability” to write, which I’m writing instead of actually writing fiction. 

I’m writing this sitting at the office, and for once I have very few meetings scheduled. I have 7-9, 10:30-11:30, and 1-2 available to me. That’s four hours of prime writing time, possibly broken up by messages needing me to do stuff (but unlikely). I can usually crank out 2500-5000 words in that time, if not more. 

And yet I’m at my desk, finger hovering over my phone, unable to make the couple of clicks it’ll take to get to Kayfabe and Kink #2 and start writing more of it. 

What’s crazy is that once I start writing I generally feel okay and keep doing it; it’s like the magical spankings I talked about yesterday. I can feel blah about writing, but once I actually start I get on a roll rather quickly. It would literally take barely any effort at all to open the file I need to open, scroll to the bottom of it, and add more. 

I wonder if part of this is because I have an outline, so I know exactly how this book is going to end and what all the story beats are. When I wrote The Submission of Ivy Venom, I had only a very vague outline in my head. I knew generally where I was going and how I wanted the book to end, but the actual process of how we got to that point was a complete mystery to me until the words physically appeared on the screen. For book two, I wrote more of an outline because I knew more about what I wanted to happen in the book. 

Sometimes I write a more complete outline, like I did with this book. Sometimes I’ll jot down some notes, which is what I did with Training the Trainer. Sometimes I’ll just start writing the book, which is what I did with Lessons — and even though I went through several iterations of that before I found an angle I liked, I still didn’t really have much of an outline (and it was all in my head) beyond “princess gets spanked and falls in love with spanker”.

Knowing how the story is going to end can be detrimental to my writing process, because once I’ve written down the outline, I’ve built the scene in my head and technically “wrote” it. Then there’s no reason for me to write it again; I already know what’s going to happen, and I’ve told the story, even if it was just to myself. Why would I want to tell it again? 

Of course, that’s a silly position to take, but our brains in general can be pretty weird about what strikes their fancy. 

I spent about ten minutes writing this blog post. I now have 80 minutes left in the first block mentioned above. Will I make those simple little clicks and open my document? I don’t know. 

But I’m going to find out.

Edited to add: I ended up writing 3200 words that afternoon.