I have long believed I was not capable of writing fiction while engaged in something else, like, say, a job. I was the kind of writer who was seized by an idea, sat down, and poured out words as fast as I could. A “seat of my pantser” as they say.

This resulted in some epic crap. Really bad novels. No layers, no complexity, no interlocking story lines. Limited character and story arc. Just a headlong rush into chaos.

I am proud to say I knew this, even at the time, and these novels got properly filed away in boxes as soon as they were done.

Then I went to law school, and of all the random things to improve one’s ability to write fiction, well, it’s pretty random. I learned how to architect an entire semester’s information in my head in an accessible structure, as your entire grade for the semester is based on one 3 hour exam. By the time I graduated, I was suddenly capable of plotting a novel before I started writing it. I can architect novels now. I feel like it’s a new superpower.

I’m not claiming to have licked novel-writing, far from it. This is an endlessly awesome creative path because there’s no owning it. There’s no end to what one can learn. Like avoiding the passive voice. And sentence fragments. They’re on the list. Have been for a couple decades. I’ll get to it, I promise.

Anyway, I spent almost a year and a half doing a bunch of writing, and my novels were planned in most details before I did the actual drafting. But I still believed it had to be an immersive experience. I thought that in order to build a book in my head I had to not have any other distractions. Such as a job.

That was great until a job finally appeared. A job, with a predictable salary, and exciting challenges. I job I really like. I took the job, hoping I’d be okay. Hoping it would work out, somehow, that I could be employed and not writing and still be fine inside my head where the crazy lives.

No such luck. After only 3 months, I was having regular thoughts of quitting my job. My job which I really like and don’t want to quit. But the writing thing is a disease which cannot be run from.

I decided to try that thing that the dedicated writers do. Those insane people who write before work. Who write with discipline, even in the midst of a full life. I started getting up an hour early to write.

You know what? It worked. Unbelievably, it worked. I sneezed out some non-fiction (a palate cleanser), and then started brainstorming my next vampire novels. I have that delicious “novel eating my head” feeling. I awake in the morning thinking about the cool thing I just figured out about my heroine. And then I do my job, which I really like, and I’m excited about that all day.

I have this feeling this just might work out. Which leads me to the terror. I’m waiting for the sky to fall. This could be really amazing, if I can do it all the way through the writing process. It could be everything. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.