Posting this to get it off my chest as much as anything else, but feel free to join in.
While writing my last series I wrote a lot of background stuff. Much of it will never be seen by others, but I did end up with what amounts to two-thirds of a novel best described as a prelude to the series. Because it was only being written as background, finishing the prelude wasn't a priority. I finished the series itself over a year ago, but every time I've gone back to try and finish the prelude I seem to come up blank. I know what has to be in this last third, the major events at least, but finding my way through to those events is turning out to be very difficult. (The events are spread over too much time, which spoils the pace the story has managed to keep up to this point.)
Meanwhile I've written a few short stories and gotten deeper into organising thoughts and notes for my next big project ... but I really do want to finish that prelude. It's sitting there in my mind and stopping me from fully committing to the next project.
It's not that I'm a big fan of preludes in general, and I'm not even sure I'll even publish what I'm trying to finish (that depends on how it turns out), but I do want to finish it.
I've been here before, though never for such an extended period, so I pretty much know what is required: I've just got to sit down and start writing. But for some reason I'm finding that harder now than usual. It's very frustrating.
So instead of sitting down and writing the next bit of the story, I'm sitting here complaining about it in public. What on Earth did writers do for procrastination before the Internet?
