For about the last year, I had been working on a new fiction story. I liked the concept of the story—the main character was a grad assistant at Boston College in her last semester of her master’s in higher education and student affairs—and I liked the contrast of her love interest—a law school student in his last semester, too. I had the whole story outlined and knew how it was going to end. But I was struggling to work on it.

I worked on this story during NaNoWriMo last year and got five or six chapters written on top of the six that were already completed going into November. Then the holidays hit and I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on it. I tried to get back into it, but deep down, I just wasn’t feeling it. Maybe it was the daunting task of googling a bunch of stuff about law school and what you do post-law school that was discouraging to me; I wanted the story to be accurate, but I felt like I wasn’t doing it justice.

So I wandered back to the story I had finished in January of last year and the sequel I had started. And fell in love all over again.

Those characters are my babies. There’s just something special about them and their story. It focuses on Mallory—an assistant sports information director at Rice University—and Dylan—a college baseball pitching coach at the University of Texas—and their relationship, plus some, well lots, of college football as her dad is the head Texas A&M football coach. (I also have a weird obsession with Texas…) I created these characters during the end of my senior year of college, and for some reason, they hold a special place in my heart.

Most of the sequel is planned out—not uncommon for me, so I know how it ends. I started writing chapter four the other week and hope to spend some free time on it when I can. I’m not putting any pressure on myself to write every day; I’d rather write when I’m really feeling it and can get into a groove.

I think you need to listen when things just don’t seem right and find your way back to something that makes you happy and something you really want to work on. I don’t want to force anything if it’s just not there.

How do you switch gears on a project? What’s something that you’re working on now?