...which is pretty cool, really.

1) I am getting an intuitive sense for the shape of short stories.

I was just barely starting to plan one of my kink bingo stories (Kink - Bodily injury/alteration; Fandom - Crossover: Fire (Cashore)/The Last Unicorn), and found myself immediately thinking, oh, well I'd have to structure it around x, and y should happen offpage, and yeah, that would totally work. Which is not to say there aren't a zillion other things that are challenging and will be challenging, but it's cool to know that something that took a lot of thought a few months ago takes a bit less now.

2) There is such an emotional cycle to it.

Like, in the middle of a project, I am super absorbed in it. And when it's going well, I am high with it, and when it's going badly, it is maddening, and then at some point I hit flow and there is just nothing like it. Then comes the tedium of rereading and revising (the nitpicky part of revising, where I've already made the big changes, but I'm catching an out-of-place phrase here, a missing comma there), and finally the moment where I'm sick of it, and maybe that word could have been a different word but I don't care anymore; let me hit post and put the damn thing up.

And then, inevitably, post-project depression. In which the world doesn't stop and all jump for joy at once just because I wrote a thing, and my brain has a big project-shaped hole in it, and I'm tired, and I don't even want to look at whatever fandom it was, and there's nothing to do but be gentle with myself and wait for the next big idea to take hold.

Which I'm trying to manage by having a long and varied list of forthcoming projects (the silly one, the smutty one, the broody one, the feather-light one, the one that will require tons of research, the one I can write off the top of my head), and I think I'm doing all right. Signing up for kink bingo essentially slotted me in for five projects between now and the end of October, plus I've got a couple of unrelated ideas, and I'm sure at some point the answer to post-writing depression won't immediately be more writing, but it's working all right for the moment, and gosh it's fun to have writing in my life again.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go reread Fire.