On Thursday, I finished writing the first novel I’ve completed in almost two years.

I wrote Keeping Sweets, my first novel, in less than six months, and soon afterwards, I started the Hope Cove series. Brokenhearted took me a month and a half, Wholehearted took me 13 days, and I wrote Ironhearted in just under two months. The words fell out of my fingertips and landed on the page and I was on fire. And then that fire went out.

Between finishing the last book in the series and now, I have started ten books. Ten. But I couldn’t seem to finish them. Getting words down was painful. Reading back over what I had written was even worse. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong or how to fix it.

I thought back over the circumstances of my life when I’d written those books compared to now. The largest difference, I think, were the expectations I’d put on myself of what I should be writing, how, and when. I was no longer writing in my little insulated world. Instead of thinking about what books were speaking to me the loudest, I was suddenly considering deadlines and potential release dates. I was worried about lapse of time between installations of a series. I was plotting stories in my head and spending more time considering what the reactions to the plot would be from readers than I actually spent sorting things out.

Compounding that was logging onto Facebook and seeing what other people were doing. While I would never begrudge someone else their success, it was hard for me to stop comparing myself to others. Seeing people finishing their books and submitting them, getting contracts and seeing those books released made me feel worse about my own inadequacies.

If they could do it, why couldn’t I?

And then all of a sudden, I had a flash of an idea for a new book. It was kind of a weird idea and it didn’t align very well with the plan I had made for myself, but I was so excited about it, I set aside all the other books I “should” have been working on, and once again, the story just kind of flew from my fingertips. I started the story in April, but some pretty important life things happened in between then and now, so the bulk of the book was written in the last two weeks.

It’s been difficult, but with the help of some very enthusiastic cheerleaders, I’ve managed to put myself back into that bubble where I only pay attention to the voices in my head and somehow the writer’s block has vanished. For me, busting through the writers block is more about ignoring everything else, and keeping it simple.

Write the story that needs to be written. Nothing else matters.