Between a heat wave that pretty much obliterated most of my productivity and a small “what am I doing with my life?” crisis, I didn’t write for a week.

That’s right. I didn’t write.

Initially, I’d just decided to take a 3-day weekend from writing, something I hadn’t done in a while. Like I said, I was having a bit of a crisis and I needed to take a break and reset. However, with the heat (I don’t have A/C in my room where I spend most of my time and do most of my work) those three days stretched out to a week.

Part of my crisis was the doubt that I should be wasting all of my time writing. I’ve been getting frustrated with it, the lack of progress, the lack of motivation, the fact that it felt like work. I decided to take a few days off and see how I felt about writing. If I thought I could leave it, then I would. I didn’t know what I would do, but I’d find something.

As it turns out, not writing was actually a good thing. Oh, I still want to make my living as a writer and I’m still going to write. But not writing helped me gain some perspective on my situation.

First of all, just because I wasn’t writing didn’t mean I wasn’t still thinking like a writer. What I mean is even though I was on break, I was still getting ideas. Ideas for new stories, ideas for revisions, ideas for rewrites. I did a lot of jotting down while I wasn’t writing. It was nice having the ideas just come to me like that instead of trying to force them or beg them to come out of hiding.

And I still did other writing. I kept up with my blog posts and  I wrote in my journal. I also scribbled on a couple of other goof projects, stuff that will never see the light of day. I could do it because I had the time to do it and I didn’t feel guilty about devoting twenty minutes to writing down a bit that came to mind.

I will admit that I was very bored without my writing. Yes, sometimes (lately most of the time) it feels like a pain and a chore, but without it, I was often left staring at my computer screen wondering what I should do. Sure I read more and of course I watched baseball, but that didn’t really fill the time like writing does.

In the end, not writing for a week helped me more than if I’d pushed through it and made myself write. I needed that time to reset, recharge, and re-evaluate what I was doing and how I was doing it.

I’m back to the grind again, working on a few different projects. It still feels like work sometimes. But it feels like the right kind of work now.

First of all, let me say that aside from excerpts, I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey. And the excerpts I’ve looked at read like fanfiction. Which is fine, except this is a best selling book and a kick right to the nuts of my ego.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a knock on fanfiction. I like fanfiction. I wrote A LOT of fanfiction (well over 100 stories in at least 10 different fandoms, if not more; I can’t really remember). For me it was a great training ground. You’ve got to write a lot to learn how to be a better writer and I put in my time doing fanfiction. With characters and worlds ready-made, it was very easy to drop a story down on it and see what I could do with it. And I did a lot.

To this day, I feel my greatest fanfiction accomplishment was writing a story for a fandom that I knew little about. I mean I hadn’t even seen the movie the fandom was based around. My friend challenged me, told me some key details, and then let me go. Somehow, I was able to write a story deemed accurate and very in-canon. I’m still very pleased that I could do that.

However, in terms of popularity, nothing can compare to a story I wrote years ago. I’m not going to name the story, or hell, even the fandom because the Internet is forever and I don’t want anyone looking it up. I HATED that story. I hated it when I wrote it and I still hate it now. It was supposed to be a little one shot fic, but so many people clamored for more than I caved in and wrote more. To date, it probably eclipses everything I’ve ever written, original and fanfiction, in terms of popularity.

I’ve read it a couple of times since it was originally posted over a decade ago and while I still hate it, I also see how far I’ve come as a writer since. I still hate that story, but now I hate it on different levels, from the bones on up.

When 50 Shades of Grey first came out and its Twilight fanfic origins revealed, I gave a passing thought about giving my popular fanfic story the same treatment. Just find/replace the names and post it to see if anyone would still think it was so great.

With  my luck, they would. People would clamor over it now like they did back then and some publisher would want to buy it and then I’d have to go stick my head in the washing machine because it’s old enough that it’ll run the spin cycle without the lead closed. I couldn’t imagine being forever tied to that story, to have my success based on that story. It’s garbage and I know it and the fact that people would be willing to ignore the garbage-ness of it would make me wonder why I ever bothered to get better as a writer at all.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? I’m working on novel manuscripts, making a concerted effort to get better as a writer, and a piece of renamed fanfiction hits the best seller list. Jealous? Of course. Disappointed? Absolutely.

It makes me wonder why I’m wasting my time.

Maybe I should have stuck to fanfiction.