I wrote a book and published it, I wrote a short story and published it. I wrote about three and a half books and scrapped them for various reasons. (I’m picking the meat off them for other things and reworking the plots of others to do them justice.)

I recently started a companion book to my first book, Shameless (you should go check it out if you haven’t already), and after a good start I got to a point where it was a grind. It was increasingly hand to write the stuff I had outlined and enjoy it. I was worried I was going to end up abandoning this book as well.

My thought was I just needed to write, something…anything! I had thought about the 30 day challenge of posting every day for a complete month, but worried about two things. One was how was I going to write daily about anything when I’m having problems writing proper. Two, if I was writing for my blog daily how was I also going to write books and still have time for real life?

Then I came across another author‘s page and saw that they had written an online faux blog based story. My head swirled with the idea of dedicating a single day on my valuable five weekdays to writing a new ongoing story. This would give me time to write my book, if I ever got back to it, but also force me to write and post at least once a week. See, I’m still alive and writing guys!

This all seemed really great but I didn’t know what to write or how I was going to mysteriously write when my reason for writing this story was, I’m having problems writing. Then add in the usual self-conscious and esteem issues of posting writing serially that essential is only corrected for spelling and typos. It’s the literary equivalent of going shopping in your pyjamas. But I figured if Harlan Ellison could write a story in a book store and post it on the window when finished, I could at least try!

I decided I wanted to tell a side story to the one in my published book and the one I’m working on. The themes and tone would be similar to not create problems when/if I started writing my book again. I decided I had a vague direction and some beats and just decided to go for it. That story is The Chrysalis Project, which you should also check out—don’t worry, I’ll wait for you here on the Internet.

The funniest thing happened once I’d decided this and started writing my new story. My doubts and worries seemed to evaporate. It wasn’t that my new story was super awesome (which I hope it totally is), but rather in writing it and deciding to be less planned in writing, I got lots of ideas on the book I was supposed to be writing. And as I resumed writing that book and kept writing my online story I started to see how I could breathe life in to some of my abandoned works.

But why should you listen to some author you’ve never heard of on the Internet, right? It’s not like George R. R. Martin started writing A Song of Ice and Fire (AKA Game of Thrones) when he hit a block while writing another book, which allowed him to finish said other book. Oh, wait!