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I totally slacked off and didn’t write anything related to the Spicers in a long time.

I had another project happening, as well as taking on a second job that takes up quite a chunk of my time after coming home from my regular fulltime job.

So how do you get back to writing after slacking off for weeks on end? I had the weekend off, with nothing to do, and I resolved to sit down and write. I then spent the entire morning staring at a blank screen and not writing anything, while thinking about the sunshine outside.

It’s not that I don’t know what I want to write. I know where the story is right now, and I know what’s going to happen next, and where it goes from here. It’s just that I kinda didn’t feel like do the actual typing. I wished for a typist whom I could just tell the story as and how it happens, who would then type it all up for me.

Four hours and 2 sentences later, I found myself scrolling through my phone, trying to decide who I could call to have a “break” (or rather, a reason to procrastinate). I called my friend Dee, and told her that I was having trouble writing ANYTHING despite the fact that it was a perfect day to be creative.

She said: “Well, you’re missing the glorious weather, being scooped up in front of the screen. Why don’t you take pen and paper and sit outside and write? Type it up later.”

At first I laughed, writing by hand is much too slow. Last time I wrote by hand was when I had no computer to type. But then I thought, since I wasn’t typing anything, even writing by hand would be faster than sitting in front of an empty screen.

So I took her advice.

I got a cold beer from the fridge, put the stripy parasol in place and sat down on the balcony with pen and paper. I looked at the flowers crowding the flower-boxes, the sun shining like crazy, the cat dozing in the shade, and thought “Let’s do this.”

I only wrote a few pages, but it got me going again. After a few sentences, dialogue and descriptions just popped into my head and the paper was filling up fast. It had been in my head the entire time, it just didn’t want to come out in my cramped bedroom corner in front of my computer.

Thanks Dee, your advice was gold 🙂