Hates the Bagginses, I does.

Well, actually, no I don't. I quite like the Bagginses themselves. Bilbo's funny, Frodo's cute, although the Sackville-Bagginses – shudder.

However, I do hate my own personal Bagginses – drafting.

I remember a time when I loved drafting. It was all I wanted to do – dive into a story and scribble my little heart out. I could spend twenty of twenty-four hours writing, have the four hours sleep and get up for more. I could pour out story after story after story.

When I wrote the original drafts of the Dream of Asarlai trilogy in 2003, I got down 180,000 words in three months. Flow, I tell you. Flow.

Yet here I sit with Battle for Odana, a story that I like, with interesting ideas and great characters. A story that I find myself day-dreaming about at various times of the day or night. It should be a story pouring out of me.

Instead I find myself fighting just to get a couple of thousand words done and being so over it while doing it. It's not that the words aren't coming – I've written around 18,000 words in the past week and a half. But Lord, it's boring me!

In the two weeks before that, I was doing structural edits for Rogue Gadda (book three of the Dream). Now, this is a story that's seven years old. I've been working on it pretty consistently since November last year. If there's a story I should be bored with, this should be it.

And yet – I had a rocking time with the edits. I love being shown a problem and having to solve it. That sense of pressure really does something to my creativity. I've always worked better when there's a deadline, or expectations.

The problem with drafting is that even when you have set yourself a deadline, there still isn't the pressure there because you know that's not the end of the process. I'll have this book done by mid-October. I'll put it away for a couple of weeks and then I'll re-look at it and that's when it will start to get interesting. There will be problems and I will have to solve them in order to get the book presentable enough for people to read. Then when their reports come back there will be more problems that I'll have to solve, before it will be ready to be submitted to agents and editors.

That part of the process I love, and my impatience to get to that super-cool problem-solving part only makes the current unpleasantness even more – unpleasant.

All us writers have a part of the whole thing that we hate. A lot of writers talk about feeling like this at some point of the drafting process – hating the work, not wanting to do it, making their butt get in that seat and do the work cause that's the only option. I know I'm not alone.

But DAMN I hate those Bagginses!