I don’t know about you, but sometimes I don’t write. Okay, there’s been a lot of times when I haven’t written. Too many times actually. And then there’s what I do instead of writing. Sometimes while not writing, I actually think about my writing; this is mostly productive—kind of like daydreaming in my character.  Other times, I may spend 30 minutes or more reading about some tangent after I look up an obscure reference for my book, but I really don’t mind this either (seriously though, if you don’t know about wood ducks, they are awesome).  More often than not, my non-writing involves a swirling loop in my brain of what I should be doing but currently am not. So I asked my writing partner to see if he ever experienced anything like this and, also, to get a double check on my sanity.  “It’s not that I don’t know what to write, it’s like I can’t write sometimes. Does that make sense?”  My writing partner is the type who can just crank. I don’t mean to be disparaging; he’s faced his own set of writing problems; we all struggle; we just do it in our own way.  But my extremely lovely writing partner can authentically be non-judgmental in times like these, and after I gave him some more details of my non-writing time, he calmly but assertively stated, “Those are future problems. You just need to concentrate on what is going on now.” He has a way with words. And these words stuck. Writing without future problems, besides being productive, is actually really, really fun.