Have you ever come back to a story you took a really long break from writing? If so, how long was that break, and did you end up finishing the story? What made you stop writing it in the first place, and what made you come back to it?
I think the longest break I've ever taken on a story that I eventually went on to finish was 4-5 years. That was with Heroic Measures, my ER crossover. I can't remember when exactly I started writing it; it was sometime in 2012 or 2013. I know I had the idea and an outline going in early 2012 because I posted about it here. I wrote the first two chapters really fast, started Chapter 3, and then didn't write any more of it until the summer of 2017, when I finally finished the third chapter. I wrote Chapter 4 a year later, and then finally got into a groove with it and wrote the rest last spring and summer. It was always more of a side project, which is why I didn't even bother to start posting it until last summer, but still, it's crazy that a ten-chapter story took me 7-8 years to write, especially one that was so in my wheelhouse.
The chapter that gave me the most trouble was the most action-packed one in the whole story, a Frick & Frack one where Nick got to be a hero, so again, not sure why it took me so long. I actually think what derailed me every time I tried to work on it was that I would inevitably start watching ER for "inspiration" and get sucked into an ER marathon instead of writing.
I always knew I would come back to it and finish it eventually because BSB + ER = the perfect story for me. It was just a matter of when. The pandemic hit at the perfect time when I wasn't in the middle of another novel, so I was finally able to focus on this one and get into a groove with it. It was actually a lot harder to write than I thought it would be - kudos to the ER writers, who always made it seem so easy to seamlessly blend the medical stuff into the action of an appropriately-paced scene.
What's the longest you've worked on a story that was eventually finished?
If it's not Heroic Measures, it would be Song for the Undead, which took 7 years to finish. In terms of actual time spent consistently writing, it would definitely be Undead.