Victoria Rayne,
Author

This is the second draft of this post. The first one felt like it had too much navel-gazing. This time, I’ll try to tell it like it is.

I’m in a writer’s block slump. I haven’t felt one of these in, God, honestly years. Most of the time, as long as I can get my butt in the chair to write, I can write. And I can write quite happily. I started Honey and Venom in November of 2023 for NaNoWriMo. I finished it in January 2024. I started a side project while I was in the first pass of editing for H&V. That side project was supposed to be a novella, but turned into a novel I’m currently referring to as Haunted Bodies in my files. I got about 90% through it and froze up at the end. I haven’t given up on it, but I’ll need to come back and write those last two chapters at some point. After Haunted Bodies, I dove head-first into the sequel of Honey and Venom, a book I’m currently calling Doom and Desire. I wrote 50,000 words of it for NaNoWriMo 2024, then finished it some many months later. Now, I’m currently five chapters into the third and final installment of the Honey and Venom series, which I’m tentatively calling Eros Everlasting. I’ve come a long way, and in what I’d consider a pretty short period of time!

Ah, but now. Now I feel I’m stagnating a little. I used to write just about every day. Lately, I feel myself addicted to easier, quicker hits of dopamine—doomscrolling, video games, YouTube. My butt has been in the writing chair less and less. Why? What happened? Have I lost my ability to write? Has a spark died somewhere within me?

For the last several months, I’ve been physically unwell more often than not. Fatigued, nauseous, wracked with strange aches and pains. But worst of all, I’ve been brain-fogged. It’s bad. I find myself forgetting what I’m doing, what I’m talking about, what I’m writing. I have to recalibrate and try again more often than ever before. The culprit for this is technically modern medicine—doctors have been poisoning me on purpose, once a week every week, since October. But it’s for a good cause.

In September, I was diagnosed with stage III cancer (in my twenties, no less!). Shortly after, I began the long and bumpy chemo journey. While I consider myself lucky that the experience hasn’t been worse, I won’t pretend it’s a walk in the park. The worst part, truly, is not how it makes me physically sick, but how I can’t be as productive as I like to be. I’m the type of person who thrives on having multiple open projects, and I start to feel uneasy when I stagnate. Because of chemo and constant medical appointments, I’ve hardly had time to work on my dissertation for grad school, much less my creative projects.

Once chemo is over, there will be surgery, and then there will be radiation, and then there will be more chemo. Cancer is not a beast that you take any risks with. My doctors want to make sure they shoot those rogue cells dead. That’s great for me, but unfortunately it means I’m going to be stuck in this sick limbo for quite a while. At least a year.

Now that the moaning and groaning is out of the way, here’s what I’m going to do, and how I’m going to do it.

For my own sanity, I need to break out of my writer’s block and keep working. Progress makes me happy. And it provides a much more potent dopamine hit than doom-scrolling, I promise you. I just have to convince my own brain that that’s true.

When I don’t want to write but I feel like I need to, I usually just sit my butt down and force myself to do it. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Like starting your homework as a kid, opening the document and starting to type is the hardest part. After a few minutes, I either find myself sucked in, or I’m happy I at least got something on the page. This is what I have to do for myself, because I know it works.

Tonight, for some reason, I had trouble with even that first step. I opened the document (in this case, that document was chapter six of Eros Everlasting). I read the last bit I wrote of chapter five to reorient myself. Then the oven beeped. I got up and threw a frozen pizza in.

I sat back down. I began calculating how many words I’d written of the book so far. 10,031, cool. I stared at the page. Somehow, my pizza was already done. I took it out, I sliced it up, I shoved it in my mouth. I could hardly taste it. It was like sand. Thanks, chemo!

It was also cold in the middle. Thanks, oven!

I sat back down in my chair. I stared at the blank page. Somehow I ended up on a new Google Chrome tab, reading about starting an LLC. What am I doing? I went back to the blank Word document. I stared. I opened my website. Maybe, I thought, I just needed to write something else to tease the writer’s block out. Now you see how I ended up here.

At least it was high time I offered something up to this blog. I certainly haven’t posted in a while, despite having written two novels for the series I previously blogged about. I hope I was able to offer some insight here as to what I’ve been up to and how it’s been going. A lot of what I’ve watched on YouTube lately has been video essays about writing, updates about online writing community drama, and other topics along that vein. It made me long for the page again. Not to mention I just finished reading a really good book on the Kindle I was gifted for Christmas (Little Heaven by Nick Cutter! Not for the faint of heart). I’d love to post here about the books I read, if I can find it in me during the chemo grind.

Regardless of how slow my progress is while I deal with this stupid disease, you can rest assured I will never stop writing for good, and I will not give up on the story of Kelsin and Emory. I want you to meet them properly and see how their journey ends. And because I dearly want it, I’m going to make it happen. One step at a time.

If you read all the way to this point, thank you! I wish you good health, and that you keep engaging with what you love. I will work on the very same.

See you on the flip side. It’s time for me to knock out some pages of Eros Everlasting.