A year later

A year ago I decided to sit down and try to finish my book.  The one I had been working on for years, probably going on 6 or more at this point.  Early last year (2025) I was able to dedicate a lot of time and energy to it before moving into a very busy season at work for me in the Spring.  Once I had recovered from that burnout, I wrote some fairly large new sections over the Summer. Which was a lot of fun!  There were large missing chunks of the story that I had some vague idea of how I wanted to address, but hadn’t spent the time to really explore what was there.  At some point I realized - this is all made up! I can do whatever I want, what I think feels fun and creative and is what I would want to read.  It felt like a kind of funny realization to have and made the process really enjoyable.  Instead of feeling like I needed to slog through ‘less interesting’ parts of the story, I decided I could just make them interesting to work on and solve the problem from both angles.  I didn’t set out intending to have sections that felt like a chore to me - and I would assume by proxy a chore for readers as well.  So why was I approaching it that way?