This morning I had one of those “Ohhhh!” moments of writerly epiphany, when I realized why I’ve been finding the last three or four chapters of the Work-In-Progress something of a struggle, where the run up to that point had been really fairly easy. It’s because I screwed up and shouldn’t have written those chapters. I took the story in entirely the wrong direction, and I’ve ended up in this awful spot where nothing’s been happening; just a whole lot of exposition and introducing my main characters to new people for four chapters.
The good news about the epiphany is that I know exactly what I did wrong and where I did it. The bad news? I’ve been working on Chapter 13…and now, tonight, after I re-read the thing to refresh certain details in my head and prime the pump, I’ll be back on Chapter 9. Oh well.
see, THAT is why I'll never write in long form; I'd be crushed by the process.
Yeah, that happens to me all the time. Eventually you get better at recognizing it before you go too far down those blind alleys.