#writer's block

I'm writing a novel, and have been since August 2024. I finished draft one in December 2026, fourteen months later. I wrote 35k words, and it was hard. I remember having to take breaks, having periods where I didn't know where to take the story, where writing one sentence in the draft felt like torture. On 1 April 2025, nine months in, I had written over 21.5k words and was in chapter eleven. Since starting draft two in January of this year (2026), I've written just over 8k in eight months, and that feels absolutely pitiful to me.

But then the part of me that is aggressively patient and kind, to me and my friends and the stranger in the other lane of traffic, grabs me by the shoulders and says, "Stop. Think. Why haven't you written as much? Give me an actual answer."

And then I do, and I remember that summer is the time where I work on my more tactile creativity: crochet, knitting, and drawing. It's the time where I explore more of who I am as a person, where I'm not sitting in classes or working most of the day and taking breaks to hash out a few sentences. I remember that I've been taking opportunities, traveling with my family, learning social skills that I missed when I was younger, bonding with my extended family, and developing interests new and old. I remember that summer is hard for me: a time of lower focus, a time of "hurry up and wait". A time where I'm just trying to vibe, rather than get things done.

Autumn is a time to reap what I sowed in the spring, to realize the plans I laid and reap the benefits of what I tried over the summer. Winter is a time to be cosy, to get things done slowly but surely to earlier dusks and later dawns. Spring is a time to wake up, to get excited, to bloom with all I've created. And summer is the time to let myself grow quietly, without fanfare, without pushing myself to do it in the daylight or late into the night.

my god it's like pulling teeth!!

As my bio says, I'm a Librarian, Linguist, Fencer, and part-time Muse-Whisperer. I've been writing for over two decades- fic and original stories- but in the last 6 years, deep, chronic writer's block cut me loose from the muse. Only recently, fic has helped me come back from that void in the creative juices.

I can be found on A03, Wattpad, with a minimal presence on FF.net. Currently working on a longfic in The Green Hornet (1966-67) fandom, my bread-and-butter fandom. Small, niche, but with a very old pedigree (the Character and fandom itself is 90 years old this year, while the TV series canon I write for is 60 years old this September). The biggest claim to fame the series has is that it was Bruce Lee's first American television role.

My adoration for this fandom, and especially the TV series, is simple: If only one writer remembers and writes, it's never dead. And Green Hornet, especially GH 66, should never die.

My latest work in it is a western noir spy thriller set in Arizona's Dragoon Mountains over Christmas 1966. I've taken the usual setting and tropes and stripped them. Quite fun. It's a sequel to an earlier work in the same fandom. You don't have to be exactly familiar with the characters/premise/TV series to read these, but it, of course, helps.

If you're interested, they're grouped under The Stung Series on AO3.

A/N: This is very much me free-writing here, so it's going to be rambly and weird. Read at your own risk:D

Writer's block is such a nightmare for those of us who are neurospicy AND unmedicated. I am haunted by voices begging me to write while simultaneously freezing up every time I pick up a pen or whip out my keyboard.

Even now, as I write this, I am still editing every word and sentence, rethinking each one over and over.

And that's the worst part, I think. The words are there. Somewhere. I know they're there. I can practically feel them piling up in my head, all these thoughts and sentences and little scenes demanding to be written down, but the second I actually try to put them on the page, everything goes completely blank.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm even struggling with writer's block, or if I'm struggling with the idea that what I write has to be good.

Because those are two very different things.

I can have an entire story living rent-free in my head. I can know exactly what a character is feeling, what they want to say, what happens next, what the scene looks like, what the dialogue sounds like. I can see it all so clearly.

But ask me to actually write it down?

Suddenly I have forgotten how language works.

I know that the first draft is allowed to be bad. I know that I can fix the wording later. I know that nobody is standing over my shoulder with a red pen judging every sentence.

And yet my brain refuses to believe me.