So I got 50,000 words of this story written. People have died of old age doing it that way. I didn't want to slow down and figure out every little detail before writing the first chapter. 'Names can be changed' was my mantra.)Īnd as Kass (my main character) learned how time travel worked in this world, I learned how time travel worked. (Clever name, right? I was just trying to get the words down. My character learned the ins and outs of being a time traveler working for The Agency. I build a few new settings, I had new characters walk onto the page. The words came slowly at first, then faster. I was going to write the best dad-gum YA time travel book ever written. Now it was just time to sit down and write the darn thing.

But what I can tell you is that I am writing. I don't know when the next book will come out. I'm not sure what will happen with my writing. And I got so excited about it that I felt an almost panicky feeling. Something I've never seen before in fiction. And I've been kinda excited about it.Īnd then today, I had an idea on six other related short stories that could become something very cool. I wrote down my idea, sketching out a short story from beginning to end. (The guilt of not finishing my other books had been the only motivation I'd had during that time, and it wasn't enough motivation, obviously.) The first inkling that I would ever be able to write again. The first idea I've had in a very, very long time. And I'm still in the middle of that process. I'm not sure which.ĭuring that time, I moved twice and took care of my kids, took a few college classes, and prepared to build my life back from the ground up. (I've been in the middle of Lost Princesses for an embarrassingly long time.) I just didn't.

It's not that I didn't have ideas or something to be working on. Like I said, it's not that I didn't have the time. I had no desire to be creative or think about stories or even read. And the emotional stress, or depression, or whatever you want to call it (neither of those terms seem quite right) whatever it was, it sucked the creativity out of me. (Or so I've been told.) But my life was falling apart, and I felt like I couldn't talk to anybody about it for over a year. Everyone has time to write, if they make it a priority. It's not that I didn't have time to write. I've even written ridiculously impossible scenes before and then edited them into coherency. Free writing, brain maps, and character interviews are all useful for that sort of thing. I wrote for over seven years and hadn't ever experienced a block that I couldn't work free of in an hour. That you could just sit down and start writing, and eventually you would figure out what should happen next. I always thought that writer's block wasn't a real thing.

The Fairy Tale Trap by Emily Casey