I encounter this illness periodically. All right. All the time. But I didn’t feel the infection’s impact last year. Or back in 2005. And with how I have been in remission for the last three months, I thought I had conquered this bewildering sickness.

Until last week. And then the infection reared its ugly head and everything sort of just ground to a complete stop.

Writer’s Block.

Oh. Dreaded, evil, awful writer’s block. How I hate thee.

I started Homeleaving punctually on November 1st. Poured out an easy 2,000 words. The words flowed and the voices rang and I just wrote and wrote and wrote. And then I hit it. Another wall.

No. Not the overwhelming, grieving wall. Not even the walls inside my house. Just the wall of “what is actually happening?” because I am usually a pantser. I just pour out my thoughts and follow the characters and let them do what they want and I listen to them and write down their actions and thoughts.

I thought this novel was going to particularly easy. A main character is 16. I’ve been 16. And on top of that, she’s not doing well in chemistry. Hey! Me too!

And because she’s not doing well in chemistry, she decides to change her future career. Wow! I did that too. Only she gets a tutor and has a hard time with her tutor who is a bit of a snob and then the character decides to pursue her career after all and the novel ends and happy ending and all that.

And this is my first draft which means it’s a rough draft so I’m more than happy to make mistakes and change things in subsequent drafts.

But I got stuck. Just because I almost failed chemistry and decided not to be a dolphin trainer after all didn’t give me enough of a memory bank (ironic, isn’t it?) to write from my character’s perspective. And then her mother stymied me. I knew her problem. I knew, sort of, why she was suffering the way she was. But I couldn’t dig.

I couldn’t write. I wrote in my poetry journal. I wrote in my regular journals. I wrote on this blog. But Homeleaving sputtered to a rude stop.

I couldn’t abandon this novel. About five or so years ago, I started a novel that I did abandon. I was out of my element and Peter had just been diagnosed with dementia and life was brutal. I couldn’t write about other characters’ traumas. I couldn’t follow their journeys. I am going to write that novel in the future. Maybe next year. Not during NaNoWriMo. That’s my Louiston time.

I know Louiston. But something about this novel just pushed me into a feral corner and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t write. But I had to. So I decided to try something else.

I plotted. I created Hazel’s class schedule. I named her teachers. I found the curriculum course of studies for her classes and set it up against her school’s calendar. And then I created a series of town events for Louiston which then set into motion Hattie’s character development. And as Hattie blossomed, so did the third and final narrator, Hattie’s oldest sibling, Bridget, who is Hazel’s mother.

And over the weekend, as I visited with Lauren, the muse for Polishing the Bones, I listened to a wonderful podcast with YoYo Ma in which he travels to West Virginia and the podcast’s co-host interviewed coal miners, current and former. And Hazel’s tutor, Kayla, came into being. Louiston’s past, which I had always known was (no pun intended) grounded in coal, came even more into focus. I saw new aspects of the conflict.

Most of all, I got to know the ghosts haunting Bridget’s house. And I spent time with Bridget because she, too, felt familiar. I know that woman’s nuances. Her insecurities. Her pains. Many of them are mine. I also wonder if they were Peter’s too given he was the oldest, he was my role model. He was also the one who stood between our parents and me and definitely saw me as one who acted foolishly and caused our parents grief. Anxiety. Frustration.

And so, today, I finished my calendar. I know where my novel is going and will follow its steps. I will still allow my characters to breathe because I have fought with characters in the past (like last week) and know that character-writer conflicts always end with me losing and them winning and the writing being so much stronger because of it.

And, already, the words flow once more.

Now, just wait until you meet Mathilde.