Last month, I sent you something called "Why most of my books have two authors." It was all about my creative relationship with my constant co-author, Sean Platt.

I got a lot of responses to that one. (Something I encourage, by the way. I don't get a lot of replies to these, so sometimes I wonder if anyone is reading.) I must never have explained the way Sean and I co-author to a lot of you ... or maybe I just didn't go into as much detail. Readers seemed to think it was interesting, hearing how we work together.

Separately, for a while now, I've been telling you about a project I'm working on called The Ephemera. I sent my mood-making photos, shared my soundtrack, and even sent a sample. The Ephemera had been started in the past, but I told you I got gridlocked back then and was rebooting it now. I figured it out this time, I said. Figuring had been tricky because I don't write solo very often, and The Ephemera was solo. But I got it. I had The Ephemera handled this time around.

Until I didn't. Until I hit the same damn roadblocks I'd hit with it in the past.

Those roadblocks had nothing to do with problems in the story, and I know that because the story was different the second time. These were new roadblocks -- new reasons I'd hit a wall and couldn't figure out what happened next.

But no, no, that's not quite correct. It was less that I couldn't figure out what happened next, and more that I didn't really care what happened next.

See, writing is an act of faith for me, and it runs on the twin fuels of excitement and fun. When a story is exciting and fun, I blaze right through it. Mine Zero was that way. Moloch was that way. Suicide Flats was that way. They were fluid, and all three of those books, I wrote by myself ...

... inside of a pre-existing world (Gore Point) that Sean and I had created together. Meaning that although there was no PLOT laid out for any of those stories, the WORLD AND ITS LORE definitely were -- by the creative pairing of Truant and Platt, meaning that those projects weren't solo after all.

Whenever I strayed away Sean's and my existing worlds -- whenever I tried to truly go solo over the past few years -- I found I could do nothing ... or, again, it was more that I wasn't compelled or interested in doing anything. I couldn't generate enthusiasm. I just couldn't get excited about what I was writing ... and because of how I'm wired, I couldn't gut my way through it without excitement, either. That's just how my brain works: I'm almost incapable of doing creative things that don't excite me.

It was so frustrating. So maddening. I mean, it's not like I hadn't done this over a hundred times before.

​If you're interested in the foibles of writer's block in all its forms, my co-hosts and I recorded an entire episode of our One-Drink Book Club podcast all about it. The short version of our discussion, though, was that for me at least, writer's block is like trying to fix a malfunctioning black box without being able to see inside it. All you know is that something isn't working, but there's no telling what it might be or why.

I concluded after that podcast episode that my issue was this: Although I think I'm not a planner when it comes to writing, I'm definitely a planner when it comes to everything else. So guess what? Turns out I need a plan while writing too. It's just that the definition of "plan" looks a lot different where story is concerned. The plans that Sean and I made before and while writing together were so loose in terms of plot, I thought maybe I could write without any plan at all. That's what it felt like, anyway, since many times I ignored our halfway-plots entirely and just wrote what came into my head.

But ... nope. I couldn't do that. I needed some sort of a plan after all.

I figured the solution would be for me to learn how to do Sean's part of the equation. I needed to learn how to form a world, build characters before those characters had anything to do, and come up with all sorts of gonzo shit that had always made our stories so cool. (Who remembers the Dinosaur Missouri? What about slumberguns and clerics?) I figured that with some practice, I could do that.

And I'm sure I could, with enough practice. I could figure out how to write "beats," which is what Sean and I collectively call all that stuff. I'd even done it before, back when Sean's company wanted a bunch of beats packages created en masse. The beats I wrote back then were good. I just needed to reconnect with the time I'd written them, do it again, and then flip into Johnny Mode afterward and write a book around them.

Problem was, I didn't want to. Getting good at writing beats sounded productive, but it sure as hell didn't sound fun to me. And what do we know already? That I'm really bad at forcing myself to do something creatively that's no fun.

So I kept putting off the idea of "writing my own beats." And putting it off. And putting it off.

Making things worse (even LESS fun to think about) was the disheartening realization that although I could go back and retroactively write beats for The Ephemera, I probably couldn't save what I'd already written. After my beats were written and I was ready to get to the fun part of writing the actual story, I couldn't just pick up The Ephemera where I'd left off. Instead, I'd have to go all the way back to zero and start the book from scratch.

Again.

For the third time.

None of what lay ahead of me sounded exciting. None of it sounded fun. And man, it used to be so fun back when Sean and I were at our peak! Back before we got all enmeshed in building a business -- something I never should have been involved in in the first place, and that really fucked up our writing mojo after a while.

Back in 2013 and 2014, before the business shit got in the way, I wrote "a complete Harry Potter series and a half" worth of words every year: 1.5 million words (about 12-20 books, depending on length) per annum. And they weren't garbage words, either. The faster I wrote, the better the books turned out. The faster Sean and I worked, the more thrilling it was. WRITING WAS SO DAMN FUN back then!

And it was only dawning on me, as I contemplated my roadblock with The Ephemera, that writing hasn't been consistently fun for a long time.

It was possible for me to have fun and find flow for a little while, but that was it. Suicide Flats felt great, for instance, but after I finished it, I hit a dead end because the next project wasn't apparent, and searching for it (and planning it) didn't feel great at all. Unless I wanted to turn around and keep writing in the Gore Point world forever, I frankly had no idea what to write next ... and nothing I came up with sounded remotely thrilling.

I slowly realized that FUN was what was missing. FUN is downright essential to my process. It wasn't just nice if I could enjoy my work. I needed to enjoy it to do it well, and for the result to be as good as it'd always been.

And yet, looking back at our older books, I saw that I'd forgotten the fun of the past. I'd forgotten how easy it used to be. I'd been banging my head against the wall in one way or another for a few years by the time the penny dropped, and that meant I'd gotten used to the drudgery of it all. The slow decay of that very obvious requirement of our work was like watching windows get slowly dirtier every day, never realizing how dirty they are until you wake up one day years later and truly look at them for real, suddenly disgusted by what you see.

So last week, thinking about all of this, I asked myself a question.

I asked myself why I was trying so hard to go it alone, when our Lennon-and-McCartney vibe had always been so strong. Why exactly was I trying so hard when the easier, more exciting, and more fun alternative had been right there all along?

Well, part of the answer (part of the reason I kept insisting on writing alone despite knowing how facile writing together was) was that I wanted to prove to myself that I could still write entirely by myself, like I did with the Fat Vampire series and a few other books. Another part was that I hated having a single point of failure: If it ever turned out that I couldn't write with Sean, that single point of failure meant I maybe wouldn't be able to write at all. I mean, think about it: You don't go into the wilderness without at least a Swiss Army knife. Similarly, it didn't sound like a good idea for me to go into writing without having the vital tool of ... you know ... being able to do the whole thing.

And of course, the last reason was pride. My pride told me that I absolutely had to prove to myself that just like in The Barbie Movie, I was Kenough all by myself.

I didn't want to give up on developing the beats-writing, idea-honing, world-planning skill that Sean always brings so brilliantly to our partnership, and in the long term, I still won't. I'll still figure it out ... eventually. I'll still learn that skill ... at some point. I do, definitely, want to re-learn how to write books all on my own, if only to prove I'm able.

But why did I think I had to do it all RIGHT NOW?

Why, after realizing that it'd been YEARS since I'd felt the over-the-top joy and creative energy Sean and I used to have, did I still insist on banging my head, trying to make it work right now no matter how hard and frustrating it was? No matter how useless and impotent I'd been feeling as a storyteller?

See also: Pride. See also: Stubbornness.

The idiotic truth was, I didn't want to give up simply because I don't like giving up. It feels like failing to me, to leave a project unfinished -- and I don't mean just The Ephemera, but instead the whole idea of shoring myself up as a one-man-shop.

It's stupid. It's absurd of me to think that way, and I damn well know better. The last time I kept doing something shitty "just because I had to see it through to the end" was when I was in grad school, working on a PhD in genetics. That time, my refusal to quit despite all the "this is wrong for you, asshole" signs I'd been getting ended up giving me panic attacks.

But here's the thing: Quitting THAT time was what ended up making me a writer in the first place. If I'd "kept at grad school until it was done," I might never have written any books at all.

I'm through being stupid.

I'm through tying my own creative noose.

I'm tired, my friends, of not having any fun writing. I'm tired of it feeling like work. I'm tired of not creating as good of stories as I'm capable, and as I used to create.

So last Friday, Sean and I met for a walk. And I told him all of what I just told you.

I said, "Dude. Let's get the band back together. Let's roll time all the way back -- before my stubborn insistence, before our ill-advised idea to run a huge business together got in the way, before writing became a left-brained, trying-to-figure-it-all-out-amidst-the-other-chaos endeavor -- and let's just FUCKING TELL SOME COOL FUCKING STORIES TOGETHER again."

Like in the days of Unicorn Western. And The Beam. And Robot Proletariat. And unappreciated, under-read comedy projects like GREENS and EVERYONE GETS DIVORCED and especially ADULT VIDEO, back when we wrote whatever the hell sounded fun, no matter how well we thought it'd sell or whatever flack we thought we might take for being a pair of immature assholes at the same time as we felt like visionaries.

We're going all the way back to our best years, my friends.

Truant and Platt are back.

JT