Misappropriated Creativity

Confession time:

I haven't worked on my novel in such a long time that I'm ashamed to even guess how long it's been. Except for a small section that I'm not even sure will make it into the book, I haven't touched it in probably close to two months.

I'm not necessarily suffering from writer's block, (which was my first suspect) because I am writing.

I'm just not writing my novel.

I think I'm going to call it misappropriated creativity (and if that term is not copyrighted already, I claim it!).

During my Google image search for "claim" 
I found like 45 books with "claimed by" in the
title with about a third just called "Claimed."
This is the most PG cover in the bunch.
I wouldn't recommend reading the others in public.
I'm sorry I googled it in the library.

I've been working on writing prompts for writer's group, editing a short story to enter into a writing contest, writing blog posts, trying to figure out how to make the second part of a novella work, jotting down book ideas that pop into my head but don't actually have time to work on, networking, and trying to improve my author social media platform.

Not to mention the non-writing-related stuff I do like work, Facebook, reading, my teacup-sized social life, and Netflix.

The me from a few years ago would say "Hey, chill out. You're still working on writer's stuff, that's good enough." The problem is, it's not good enough. November 2nd will be the one year anniversary of the last book I wrote, Love Drunk and Dragon Tears, going live on Amazon. It's been a year since I published a book. A year since I've finished writing a book.

It kind of hurts the pride a little bit.

I know that writing a novel, especially in a genre I haven't really written in before, takes more time than writing a novella with a fairly simple story-line, it's just hard to gauge how much writing I'm actually doing when it is scattered across 20 projects instead of focused on one.

Which makes me feel like I'm not doing much work and failing at writing... even though I'm not. Such is life.

Picture from Sparklife
That sounds about right.

Now that I've identified the problem and confessed it to the world, what am I going to do?

Probably go finish editing that short story, work on the writing prompts for next week, cruise Facebook, and call it a night.