I took a couple of cheat days this week because I was writing. It's an excuse, but I'll take it.
One of the things I used to be able to do, back in the day, was write for fun. Showing the results to people was good for a laugh, but I used to have a lot of projects stuffed haphazardly into my head, and notebooks, and badly-organized desktop folders.
When I ended up with a couple of regular, paying jobs as a writer, one of the first problems I ran into was that I didn't do a lot of writing for its own sake anymore. I could rouse myself to work on a personal project now and again, and my emails and instant messages were often a little more overwrought than they technically had to be, but writing was the day job. I wasn't often inclined to clock out and go do it some more.
I've had some dead time in my schedule lately, though, and writing for fun's a skill I've been meaning to reacquire. Most of the time, it's unsalable dross: deliberately derivative science fiction, a couple of parodies. There were a couple of times over the last couple of years where I tried to write porn, once on a dare and once in an attempt to crack into the thriving dinosaur erotica market, and it developed into a more interesting universe than I anticipated and stopped being porn.
My endgame was always to be a professional novelist, but the problem with that sort of goal is that it's easy to focus on, which often blinds you to all the work you have to do in the meantime. The best way I know of to get that sort of work done, then, is to make sure it isn't work.
