Last month, I was struggling with something that came as close to “failure” as I have in my writing career. For the first time EVER, I'm did something I never thought I would: I paused a project mid-book and changed stories. Working on The Last March (The Silent Champions #6--a prequel standalone that closes out the world nicely) felt like pulling teeth a bit, and it was VERY hard to get the story out. It felt like trying to wring water from a stone. For those of you who’ve been following me for a while, you know that writing started out as something I loved to do. I LOVE bringing stories to life. I’ve written all these years it became something both therapeutic and an outlet for my innate creativity. I've turned it into a career, one I intend to keep at until I can no longer craft stories. I don't want to lose that love. I don't want to lose the passion that makes me tell the best possible stories--the stories you readers connect with. So for the first time, I had to shut up my anxieties and fears for the future, the worries that come with being an artist, and I went with my gut. (Yes, I'm a chronic over-thinker...) Let’s be real, the last couple of years have been INTENSE! I’ve worked hard for the last 10 months to bring The Silent Champions to life. Before that, I slaved away for 6 months to write the Heirs of Destiny. Before that, I sunk another 5 months into the last Hero of Darkness books. That’s 21 months of pretty much non-stop writing! I'm incredibly proud of those stories. I don't think for a minute I half-assed any of them. I put every bit of myself into making them come alive. I want to keep doing that. I want to NOT dread sitting down to write because I don't have a clear path forward and not really enjoying what I'm writing. The Silent Champions is currently hovering around 850,000 words. Most of them were written this year. The Last March will put the series at over 1 million words. INSANE! So instead of putting The Last March on hold indefinitely (like I felt I needed to), I continued to make slow and steady progress at it, but I didn’t binge-write it like I usually do (30+ hours of full-intensity per week). Instead, I stepped away from the norm and wrote something totally new in a totally different genre. It felt like a breath of fresh air, and it’s left me SO inspired. Now that I’m sitting back down to finish up The Last March (currently around the 50% mark), it feels so much easier to tell the story, and it’s just flowing a lot more. At the beginning, it felt nerve-wracking to think that I was going to stop something mid-project. It felt “unprofessional”, like I was somehow doing the wrong thing by not powering through and making it happen. But since that time, I’ve come to realize that I had the wrong mindset. Being a writer is about the daily grind (it takes work to put down all those words), but being the best writer I can be takes time. If I’m stressed and anxious all the time about not making progress, THAT ends up being my focus. I get so wrapped up in how I’m feeling or what I’m worrying about that it consumes my mind, occupying valuable mental real estate that should be spent focused on the characters’ feelings and worries. So now, since I’ve stepped away and come back, it’s helped to put things into perspective. I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is to stop letting anxieties and fears of the future control my actions. Instead of worrying about what might happen if I don’t work my absolute hardest all the time, I need just be focused on what I’m doing—and how I’m feeling—right now. And to remember that what I’m doing is CREATING. Art. Art isn’t always something you can summon on demand, and it’s vital as an artist to keep refilling the creative tank and finding inspiration. That’s not to say that it’s not work—it’s a damned lot of it!—but it can’t be all work. “Forcing it” like I have in the past is eventually going to lead to burnout. I know these don’t feel like huge revelations—after all, creative types have been saying the same things for years—but for a hard-headed, stubborn, goal-oriented person like me, it’s progress! And it may have felt like failure at the time, but now I realize it was the "smart" failure to make.