Not everything you write needs to be published—or even publishable.
A few years after I published my third novel (Darkfall), I fell into a dark time with my writing. I was drafting a novel that did not want to work the way I wanted it to, and I dreaded sitting down at the keyboard every day. Writing was no longer fun.
With sad relief, I set the manuscript aside and worked on a non-fiction project I'd been wanting to do (my very first writing book, Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure). I fully intended to return to fiction afterward, expecting my dread of the novel to have passed by then.
It hadn't.
I'll be honest—it was terrifying.
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