The Time Between

The period of time between projects is a weird place to be. You've just come off the high of having achieved your goal and finished your novel (or whatever). You've tasted some delicious accomplishment and hopefully, the process of finishing a draft has the inspirational effect of making you feel as though you're ready to dive headfirst into your next project. But should you do that?

Yesterday felt very weird. I had already told myself that I was going to take the day off; I mean, hell, I deserve some time away from thinking about all of this stuff. In his memoir "On Writing," Stephen King advises taking a week or two off before you start the second draft, so that you can distance yourself from the whole thing and come at the work with fresh eyes. I think that this is a good idea and plan to give myself that week. But even though, for one small, brief moment, this period of "not-writing" is justifiable, even permissible, it still feels like I should be doing something. Somewhere in the back of my, ideas are already begining to faintly stir. "The Next Book" begins to loom on the horizon of my consciousness, tantalizing and ethereal. What will I do next? I can do anything!

Being Done

I finished the first draft of my second novel today. You may be wondering why I said "second novel." Well, that's because the first novel is an absolutely horrible swords-and-sorcery fantasy that I began writing when I was fourteen. I finished it and then began writing a sequel and somewhere along the way, I completely lost interest in it. Both works are sitting on my hard drive to this day and both are somewhere around 88,000 words or so. Maybe some day I'll revisit them; hopefully, that will be after I'm super famous and people will enjoy them just because I wrote them, not because either book is actually any good.

Or maybe they'll just sit there in digital space until the end of time. That's pretty good, too.