Hey there! So I know I have things I am supposed to be doing (i.e. the next Safe Novel, the next Defiant Novel, that paranormal romance book I’m releasing this year…) but sometimes, as an author, I find that I get D I S T R A C T E D.  Not necessarily by the mundanes of life either, more often it is my own brain distracting me. Here lately I can’t seem to write the story I want to write. Why? Because that other story I want to write is screaming at me.

Don’t ask me why that happens. It’s a puzzle even to me. Some days it just happens like that. How is it possible that I can have so many different stories raging for attention in my head? I sit down to write. I stare at the screen, I plan to write the story that is currently the number one priority…. and instead other stories vie for my attention.

It’s like Writer’s block but instead of having nothing to write, it’s like I have too much to write. I have so much struggling to break out of my brain and run onto the paper that I can’t focus on a single one and then I can’t write at all. VERY FRUSTRATING.

So I screw around a bit. I try to focus. I yell at the character refusing to sit in the corner and wait their turn. Ha. That’s actually my lovely cousin’s analogy. It’s rather fitting. This is where I’ve been, though.

What do I do when this happens, though?

I’ll tell you!

I don’t know. It varies. Sometimes I write a few pages in each, jumping back and forth, back and forth, until one captures me enough that I can focus on it. Other times I have what I call “fun side stories” that I start writing on the side for myself. They’re not part of any series I’ve written, they’re just little tendrils of something in my head. Sometimes it’s complete nonsense, it’s basically just writing for the sake of writing, but I have no constraints because it’s a story that doesn’t follow my other stories’ rules. This allows me to write a little more freely and lets me get my creative juices flowing so I can get back to the story I intended to write in the first place. The best part of fun side stories is that, because I usually write them only for my eyes, the crazy factor gets amped way up. That’s why they’re so much fun. I don’t need rhyme or reason when I’m writing them.

The cool part about those fun side stories? Sometimes they become “Holy sh** this is an epic story that I must share with the world!” And in the Fall of this year I intend to release one of these stories. One of my beta readers who had the privilege of reading it first absolutely fell in love with it so much that she has read it three times. Strangely, I fell in love with it, too. I never intended to write more than a few pages of it and it blasted off all on it’s own and before I knew it, I was dozens of chapters in and writing up a storm. It was my own personal heaven and hell. I couldn’t stop, when I was forced to I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was truly the story that kept me up at night, losing sleep to write it. It was so distracting that I barely ate, I would go hours past a normal meal time before I realized I hadn’t touched food all day. I think it’s a story that’s worth remembering because you don’t just read it, you live it, you feel it, and it stretches far through the reaches of your heart and soul.

And that’s what fun side stories can do for you. Like the one I started writing in recently because I couldn’t decide what to write. Because all my characters were screaming for attention and I just needed to write. Sometimes, we just need to write. Or at least us crazy authors do 😉