Off Her Game’s book tour starts today! First stop is Babbling About Books, so don’t forget to stop by and check it out when it’s up. If you come hang out on the tour, there are some gift cards up for grabs. You can see the whole tour schedule on this post.

And don’t forget about the Goodreads giveaway. That’s going on until March 26th!

I’m also guest posting at the ROW80 blog today, so don’t forget to stop by there too!

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I’ve often told myself that writer’s block doesn’t exist. It’s just fear, or in my case, it’s my subconscious telling me that I’ve gone the wrong direction. I’ve been stalled on the sequel to Off Her Game for months. I’ve restarted it six times. But somehow in working on Off Her Game’s release, it started to become real to me, and I started getting excited about the sequel again. But at the same time, I’m afraid to try to write it again, in case I run into the same problems.

This has had me stopping to look at my issue with this book closer. Why am I blocked on it? Why am I terrified to write it?

Seriously. The writer’s muse is a fickle, fragile being. It’s sensitive and spooked easily, so we have to guard it, feed it, and help it to grow on its own if we want it to continue to work with us. So what can we as writers do to help our muse?

Give it time to recuperate.

Yeah, I’m guilty of this. I push myself super hard. All the time. I always feel like I’m falling behind. I wear All The Hats and I have to do All The Things. But this week, with finals and the release for Off Her Game and the blog tour, I just stopped writing. I’m so frazzle-brained right now that I just couldn’t work. And that’s partially why I’m sitting here blogging instead of actually writing.

We’re supposed to blog and tweet and write guest posts… I’ve written 14 of them this month, plus interviews and wrote up my Off Her Game release newsletter (which will go out next week). All those things take up some level of creativity, and brain power.

So what to do? Find a balance. I’ll admit, I shut down on blogging this month because I just didn’t have the brain power to do it. It sucks, because I do enjoy blogging. But I couldn’t handle it. I also cut out writing, which isn’t the best thing I could have done. Writing is my job, and it needs to come first. I need to remember this lesson for the next time I pile on All The Things.

Stop scaring the poor thing.

I said before, our muse is a fragile being. It spooks easy. Putting pressure on creativity can make a muse go into hiding. Some people LOVE the pressure of a deadline. But for me, and others like me, it’s detrimental. Failure makes me want to hide. It does not make me want to write. So the fear of failure or missing that deadline makes me want to crawl under a rock.

It took someone else showing me that I didn’t have as many deadlines as I thought I did. Most of it was self-imposed. And because of those pressures, I got the fear of failure.

I go through a phase where I hate the book I’m writing. Hate it. I think that it’s not good enough, that it’s never going to work… The characters suck and it was an unrealistic idea… It passes, but in the moment, fear reigns.

The muse does not like this.

What can we do as writers to combat this?

Write for YOU first. Draft the story that you want to read. This is your story. Your characters. Your world. They exist because of YOU. So stuff that inner editor in a box and duct tape it shut. Let the magic happen. Write the story. And worry about Inner Editor and First Readers and Critique Partners and whoever else later.

So now let’s talk about you. Have you ever had a serious block on writing? Have you ever abused your muse so much that it flipped you off and ran away? How do you nurture it and make it work for you?