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!
Maybe the next book will have some dragons in it.

The weird thing is that, to be honest, I've already got "The Next Book" more than halfway completed. You may recall that I paused serious work on the last novel for around eight months or so while I did NaNoWriMo 2010. I wrote a story that fluctuated between being a prequel and a sequel, given the fact that its events take place in the same universe as my current novel, but before the timeline that the first book covers. If you're wondering why I'm not using proper names, it's because I've begun trying to distance myself from the title "the Fallen" which has always been a working title; I'm pretty sure there's about forty or fifty books out this year alone that are called "the Fallen" and star at least one fallen angel.

If you want to know why I think most of my ideas are bad ones, it's because of shit like this: a small, very, very small part of me would love to try and title the first book "Rise of the Fallen." So good, right? You can almost smell the pun there.

Yeah, I'm not going to call it that. I think.

Anyway, I wrote about half a book last year before things got bogged down and I found myself in this confusing knot of uncertainty and half-formed ideas, which explains part of the reason why my output for the first half of 2011 (also known as the six months I spent doing almost nothing of importance!) was so low. This effort over the past month to get something freaking finished was mostly in response to the fact that I was tired of being tangled in two bits of two unfinished novels of varying length. (For frame of reference, Book 1 was about 100,000 words in length, while book 2 was sitting about about 55,000 words.)

But now I'm free of part of the mess. One book is done and just needs to be subject to the icy scythe of the editing process, and then it's off to the superfun process of trying to attract an agent to represent it, in the hopes that I'll some day have a published book that I can throw at people when it's time for the high school reunion. "LOOK AT WHAT I WROTE! NYAAAAR!"

I've got until 2015. Better moving.