Every time as my husband or I race toward the ending of the novel, it starts to get faster and faster to type, because there’s so much of it taking up space and intention in our head, and all the pieces are coming together. It crowds out attention to normal, everyday things from dinner to picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy, and pours out in productive writing sessions of thousands of words at a time.
…and then it’s out. When it is, there’s this tremendous roaring silence in my head where the story used to be. Nothing but standard everyday thoughts. It’s weirdly… normal?
The first time I noticed this happening, I wondered if it’d stick. It didn’t. After a few days, story started creeping in at the edges.
The first time I finished something that I’d been trying to write out for many years, and many iterations, it lasted for weeks. I started to wonder if I was stuck at normal. But no, story came back.
My husband says he avoids that by switching to another project, but I’ve only managed that once before, when a story popped up while I was trying to write already, and I could only make it wait by writing out a large chunk, then finishing the first. Impatient thing didn’t want to wait for me to finish getting the first one out to betas to be finished! Since then, it doesn’t work like that. Brain’s been stubborn on one thing at a time, and if I wasn’t finished on something, it goes from WIP to Work Not In Progress.
But story always comes creeping back.
It’s been a really rough year. I’d only got 4 writing days in this month, only 2 of where were on the airship pirate WIP. I figured I might have to declare it a WNIP and let it go, try to refill the well and try again…
Only to run into a twitter thread as air conditioning attitudes as a marker of social status in Germany,
For those with X:
https://x.com/AndrewHammel1/status/1957018808272515560
For those without, this will let you read the whole thing:
https://xcancel.com/AndrewHammel1/status/1957018808272515560
…and after a night’s sleep, I realized that even as technology changes, humans never change, and I already have a setup for this exact attitude divide running through the story. Bringing it into sharp relief… is exactly the worldbuilding that the next chapter needed.
It’s half-blocked out already. Pulling a couple other plot and character arc threads in, weave them together, and I might get another chapter written before the end of the weekend.
Don’t give up. Keep learning new things, keep refilling the well, keep taming chaos in your personal and professional life, and keep think about the story. More of it will, inevitably, keep creeping back in.
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “Don’t Give Up”
Didn’t have AC in the Hunsruck in the 90s. Didn’t need it. Except for that one heatwave that hit 100 F. Yuck. But the 100 ish year old building we were in was built for cooling, good windows that would open, cross ventilation. OTOH, what Germans consider to be adequate heating? Let’s not talk about that.
Try living with a Chinese spouse.
It’s cold – wear another sweater!
It’s hot – try fans or suck it up!
Our previous place was built in the 1960’s with lousy insulation, but was upgraded with AC and a Nest thermostat. We didn’t connect the Nest to WiFi, but “you can’t use it, because it’ll invade our privacy!”. The house went down into the 40’s during the winter, and up to 95 or so during the summer. At least our current place, which is much newer, has good insulation (temp range about 60 to 85 without heat or AC), so most of the time we don’t really need heat or AC (but we do have both).
After I finished the two unfinished short stories, I had trouble wording*. It is coming back, both something new, and something that has been simmering in the back of my mind for a long time until some resource knowledge filtered up from …. wherever data hides when I want it.
*”To word” is a verb, truly.
One advantage of circling around — there aren’t many — is that it can help keep momentum going.
That thing you mentioned, where one project was breathing down your neck as you finished the previous one, has been my norm since about 2020. There was a bad dry spell in 2021-2022, when I’d just taken a new day job, and was writing up guides to myself for the new job and guides to my successor in the old job, while wrestling with a long, complicated sequel to a book I’d already published. I blamed myself for losing interest in the stuff that had inspired that pair of books, but looking back, I wonder if maybe I wasn’t giving enough credit/blame to day job.