It’s funny how intentions have a way of going sideways. I started this month with the intentions of writing a new stand alone book, The Bounty, for NaNoWriMo. I had attempted NaNoWriMo three times prior, but this year was different. I had finished up Reverie in August and assumed I would need a little break before going back into the Malcolm Stone sage. Dissonance is a much more emotionally charged writing than Reverie. So I started plotting in October for The Bounty. I had a vague plot idea and a cast of characters. Trovi the bounty hunter, Layla the target and possible love interest, and Elias the bad guy. I started writing late in the evening on Nov 1, it was a bit of struggle. I was writing in third person prospective; the Malcolm Stone saga is in first person, and I just wasn’t feeling it. By the end of the day the story was starting to develop in my head and I liked the characters, but I still struggling to make the word count.
Day two rolled around and I wasn’t feeling like writing that book. I was thinking about where I could go with the story and how I could adjust my style to make the writing process go a little bit more smoothly, when I started to think about where I wanted to go with Dissonance. I opened my word document with the first couple chapters of Dissonance written and started writing. I closed down the saved document containing The Bounty and never looked back. I quit NaNoWriMo with a measly word count of 788. I think this year I might have finally kicked the habit of NaNoWriMo. I will one day go back to The Bounty, the story was solid and it should be fun to write, but obviously it was not the time to start writing it yet.
During the course of a week and a half I wrote over 9,000 words on Dissonance, most of those words taking place during the weekend when I have plenty of time to dedicate to writing. So I’ve learned so much about my writing process over the course of this year, when I started paying attention to the details of my writing process. I have noticed that not only do I need to heed when to write, but also what to write. Sometimes that writer’s block is just a matter of not writing the right thing, at the right time.
Amanda Staley 
You hit the nail on the head, Amanda: It is really important to write the right things at the right time. 🙂
Some people do not understand why I do not schedule my work in too much detail – until I tell them about this important statement.
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This lesson is one I have learned the hard way. I have gone months without writing because I was determined to work on a piece that just wasn’t right at the time.
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Lessons learned are shamefully underrated. It needs a certain experience to realise that a lesson learned is something that won’t ever again go wrong.
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