Somewhere, in the deep, dark depths of my hard drive, I have a mostly-complete manuscript of a prurient nature. Well, it really, really wants to be prurient, anyway. I’m not sure it quite makes it, since I don’t really have the attention span for other people’s sex lives… no, not even if they’re my own figments’ sex lives. Because, uhm… **plot bunny** and suddenly, there’s a series of explosions I have to deal with.

I do, however, go through a fairly regular phase of creative despair in which I’m absolutely positive my stories suck, and I should just turn to writing for the erotica of the month club.

In general, something usually kicks in and saves me before I get too far into Butch Billionaire Bad Boys in Space. But the knowledge that whatever I’m working on doesn’t have to be good is usually a pretty good way of kick-starting the creative juices, particularly on days when I’m not sure I’m capable of being good.

If I were going to write a romance, let’s be honest… it would probably include the words “And then he standardized her spelling, cut out sixty-two percent of her commas, and did some structural things with subplot B that somehow made the whole thing work. Also, he remembered to drop those books off at the library before she got fined. The End.”

Well, the closest I ever got is this manuscript. That lives on my hard drive. 89,000 words. That I will probably never revise, and that… well, let’s be honest… if it’s grounded in the real world (it is) and nobody dies (they don’t) I probably will never figure out quite what to do with it.

I can actually tell you why it was useful to write, though. It helped me to pin down exactly what it is that my stories tend to have in common. I tend to write about complex relationships–between individuals and cultures–and it doesn’t really matter whether I’m writing science fiction, or a romance, or a murder mystery, that will be there.

I think knowing that helps me to skim over the writers’ block phase faster. You know… what are the weirdest people I can possibly put in the same space ship? Right now, I’m moving on to something sorta different, but still the same. It’s a strange sort of thing.

I also think writing a lot without necessarily intending to keep everything has helped me get to a point where I can make more objective decisions about what’s worth revising, and when it’s time to move on.