I generally hit, not really writers block because my imagination is running, at about 40,000 words. The story just seems to slow. Generally at that point I write the ending because I’ve found when I know how it ends I can fill in how to get there and blast through another 30-40,000 words.

This time it happened at about 5,000 words. This is book 2 of a series and I started it, then had to stop for edits on The Spell and to write the Knight of Pentacles. Picking it up — it’s working title is With All Dispatch — this week it was moving a tad slowly. I found myself caught up in all this minutia around my hero that I didn’t even realize I was spinning my wheels. That was about the tim someone I work with got on their own treadmill. I looked at what they were doing and what I was doing with this story and the light bulb popped on.

I went back to the premise of the story — a modern woman with a modern problem. What is her problem? At the 5,000 word point we had a vague idea about who the problem was, but not exactly what. When I started to write about her problem the words started to flow. More than that I started to get some good images of where he fits in and what he is going to do to resolve the issue. And…he has a brother and who and how he’s going to fit in crystalized.  That was a huge energy burst and the images have been flowing non-stop. Fortunately I’ve got a three day weekend to get a lot of the concepts down and jam on the writing.

I think that happens to us all often enough in life. We need to do something and some how get caught up in these insignificant, unimportant details that crowd out what we really need to focus on. I look at this person at work and how they spend HOURS on this one small element and gets nothing else done. Once you get caught up on that treadmill the wheels keep spinning and spinning that you don’t realize nothing is changing. The scenery is the same. When you stop and redirect it can be pretty amazing about where you go at that point.