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April 21, 2019 by meredithmansfield

As promised, this post I’m going to take a look back at the last time I remember being really excited about a story, what happened, and what, if anything it may tell me about this writers’ block.

In December, I was finishing up the polishing edit of BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM.

Not the most fun part of writing, but necessary. A time when I frequently let my imagination run free, because it isn’t needed for the editing process.

And my imagination rewarded me by serving up a missing piece of one of my back-burner stories–a retelling of the Princess Furball fairy tale. I was excited about it, but stayed the course and finished up with BECOME: TO RIDE THE STORM.

Inspiration like that is a fire that burns hot–and burns out fast. Usually it’s recoverable, though, if not quite as fierce. This time . . . well, I did a little further research about that fairy tale. And discovered that the version I knew and loved was not exactly the original form. In fact, the original has some elements that I didn’t want to deal with at all.

Now, there could be a couple of ways around that. I’ll have to continue giving that some thought, but the fire was gone.

So, I tried to move on to the story I’d meant to write–or, in this case, rewrite–next anyway, MAGE STORM.

Mage Storm

And ran out of steam in Chapter 6. Trying to work on MEADOWSWEET (my version of Princess Furball) in tandem with MAGE STORM didn’t work. (I’ve literally got like two sentences on MEADOWSWEET.) Trying to skip ahead to the sequel to MAGE STORM didn’t work. Trying to switch over to DAUGHTER OF THE REBEL MAGE (a Cinderella retelling) didn’t work.

Maybe, maybe what I need to do is to circle back and try to come up with some of those possible ways around the . . . disturbing part of the original fairy tale.

It’s also possible that I need to recharge the creative well, play in some other creative sand boxes for a while, or, well, there might be a couple of other reasons for low motivation to write at the moment. I’ll explore those possibilities in future posts.