Just before sitting down at this now full screen, I was jamming to a song by Blues Traveler that was going through my head because of the title of the post. Thus, we have Winnie The Pooh chilling on the bench in the bright sunshine.
T he writing groove.
Many have searched for that elusive state of being, where the words keep flowing and that you're churning out stories at a continuous pace. Some have found it and are quite happy with their lives. Others have not. They suffer through bouts of not being able to put the proverbial pen to paper on a consistent basis and become completely aggravated with the process.
And then there are people like me, who have extended peaks and valleys with their writing. In other words, Johnstown Flood and Arizona in the summertime. I know, odd analogy, but it's an apt descriptor. You have peaks where the worlds and stories pour out at a frenetic pace until you suffer from epic burnout and you're scrapping the bottom of a tapped out vein looking for sentences.
A good example would be my blogging. I started with two posts every other day; then dropped to one post every other day; then dropped to three posts per week; then dropped to two posts per week; then finally dropped to one post per week. Oh, and I've been blogging since 2008, so...yeah.
But, as a former blogger used to say, I blogress.
I was definitely going through a medium sized valley with my writing prior to my retirement in late 2020. But after digging out the previously mentioned (repeatedly I might add) manuscripts, I started working on them in 2021, and I slowly started digging myself out of the valley that was my current writing home.
By 2022, when I was hip deep in year one of writing my fantasy series, my writing groove was mostly back. Although I wasn't doing any original writing of stories, I was enjoying blogging once again, and I was a Happy Boy.
Later in 2022, I got bit by the short story bug, and for the next several months, I wrote there short stories. I didn't write anymore after those initial three because I didn't want to get too sidetracked while writing my fantasy series.
Fast forward to 2025. I had written the last sentence of my series in mid-February, and I eventually hit that small rut that everyone goes through after completing a novel. But I wasn't terribly worried, in that I was busy getting this novella published and that usually takes me four to five months to complete.
Oddly, or strangely enough, depending on your viewpoint, I got bitten by the short story bug again. This time, in addition to writing original stuff, I thought I would take a crack at rewriting old stuff. Now if you're like me, you never really toss old stories away into the circular file, you just stash them inside a three ring binder and pray you don't forget them.
Now I do want to point out the underlying reason why his short story bug came back to bite me after being dormant for three years: I had forced myself to take a one year sabbatical before I got back to the serious business of editing the final master draft of my series.
So I dug out several extra stories to rework and rewrite, which is what I spent all 2025 doing. With one of the stories, after I had reworked/rewrite to my satisfaction, I made four different attempts at turning it into a novella.
After that fourth attempt, I decided that I didn't want to spend months researching and writing a novella that would have taken time away from my fantasy series.
Fast forward a few months to 2026. I decided that I would document my journey to publication on Meta (aka Facebook), like I've been doing on my blog. I initially wrote about 15 posts from Dec '25 through Jan '26, then once I got in a good editing groove, kept stockpiling more posts (I publish twice a week on Meta), as well as writing updates.
Now we're here in mid-April and not only am I still stockpiling posts and writing updates to my editing (still slogging away on book #3), but now I've also started stockpiling posts for a novella that I wanted to re-publish this summer. So I can definitely say that once again, I've found my writing groove.
Or, as the Blues Travelers opines, "it's all in the groove!"
Happy Monday and may your week be a dream on your reality check.
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