God help me, I’ve figured it out.

Yes, I’m talking about fan fiction again.

(No, I haven’t figured out the appeal of some of those fetishes. I hope to go my entire life without doing so. If I die still thinking that m-preg is a dreadfully alien concept, I will not feel that my time on this earth has been wasted.)

I’ve been having a sudden mad urge to write fan fic, despite having absolutely no time whatsoever to do so, and I’ve realized why.

I think I get these urges when I have been writing for a long stretch–or worse yet, editing!–and it has stopped being fun. I get the urge to drag my own characters out behind the barn and go Old Yeller on their asses. Then I get some down time, and I no longer want to flee screaming from the notion of a story of any sort, but at the same time, I am still fairly well burned out, and I want to do something that is purely, fluffily, entirely fun.

Case in point, I am on the very last round of Nurk edits. I am proud of the book. I feel that it is a good book. I am honored to have it published, and delighted to have worked with the editor I got.

I am also very…very…VERY…sick of it by now.

Enter fan fic. You get to just write the good parts.

It’s a kind of hysterical catharsis. I don’t even feel guilty about doing it any more, because I’ve gotten to the point where I can say, “Yeah, I write,” without cringing in automatic fear of the literary gods striking me from on high–I may not be a REAL writer (does anyone ever think they’re a real writer?) but between Digger, Black Dogs, Nurkand my agent, I can fake it pretty well.

Mind you, I’m still not telling you what fandom or what pen-name it is…nobody’s ever connected me to my last efforts, and god willing, they never will.