In A Slump

It's been a little more than a month now since I completed my first draft of The Crystal Keeper, a young adult fantasy novel and the prequel to The Rock of Ivanore. I spent all of 2010 writing it, an entire year of late and sometimes sleepless nights as my fingers busily transposed the story in my head onto the computer. In fact, sleep was an obstacle. So was time. I could swear the clock sped up every time I sat down to write. I just couldn't type fast enough.

Now that it's over, I don't know what to do with myself. I wander around the kitchen eating things. I check my email a dozen times a day. I actually clean the house and do dishes. I watch old episodes of Taxi with my husband. (That's how bad it's gotten.)

This happens to me every time I finish a manuscript. I flounder around for a while until I finally settle on another specific project and get to work. The problem is I have a dozen potential projects bouncing around. It's kind of like a Bingo tumbler. All those tiles being tossed around as the tumbler spins, while everyone anxiously waits for that one special tile to be drawn and called.

That's me. I'm anxiously waiting for that one special project to find its way out of the storm of ideas floating around in my head and make itself heard. Once that happens, I'll become my happy, obsessed, driven self again. Until then, I'll just have to entertain myself watching those reruns on TV.

Or maybe I'll just go wash the dishes again...