...her beef stew was too die for, and her tub sparkled...

I used to have writer's block. Actually, I used to have totally avoid the chair, go clean the bathroom block, which is close, but not as bad as take-a-nap block. I know a lot of it had to do with life issues, but a big chunk was simple outright fear. After a gazillion rejections, I had settled into TWRP secure in the knowledge DalCon had found a home.

Someone out there would read my messed up characters, and all that research I'd put into mega-corp structure, geothermal energy and helicopters wouldn't go to waste. But...like Gina said years ago, it's just a building block. I learned a lot from my wonderful editor Laura Kelly (who btw, launched a fabulous freelance editing service, LKES Laura Kelly Editing Services). I think I was her "project", in the same way I picked that project about the salesclerk at Walgreen's. Great voice, bad shape. The process taught me the huge difference between a character driven plot with emotional structure, and plot-driven or episodic scene structure. Not that I think I've developed it in my writing to where I want it, but at least I can see the goal--somewhere over on the horizon.

But--to be successful at writing, you need to produce, and to put it bluntly--my production sucks. Then I listened to the Stephanie Bond lecture. No clue why it clicked, I'd heard the info before, but maybe because she's such a good speaker, this time it sank in.

She said a friend of hers could write five pages in an hour, without distractions, without stopping. Just sit and write. So if you break that down into fifteen minute intervals, can you write two pages in fifteen minutes?

I locked my door, sat down, turned off everything but my current wips, and wrote. When I got stuck, I scrolled down to a different point in the wip, and kept going. If I couldn't, I opened another wip and wrote that instead. And...in fifteen minutes, I wrote three pages.

A couple of hours later, I did the same thing, and wrote two pages.

It's created havoc in my formerly spotless house, there's laundry in the basket, and there are soda cans lurking in my son's room under the empty MacDonald's bags, but...I wrote five pages in a day, and it didn't feel like work because it was fifteen minutes. I'm not sure if it works because I keep the windows minimized, or because it takes less time than washing clothes, but it continues to work--like I flipped some kind of switch in my brain where instead of going "it's so hard..." I can now say..."it takes longer to eat a sandwich."

I'm not blocked. I just write. I "can" write again, for fifteen minutes out of my day, sometimes more.