The Next Project (Jason's first post in *how* long?)

I just finished writing a rough draft of another book a week ago. Typically, in my writing life, I've noticed that it takes me about 7-14 days after such an achievement to be up for doing any other creative work. Instead, I ponder what I'll do next. Ideas bounce around in my head, every one gaining massive amounts of traction and then fading to nothing when I don't start writing immediately. But it's been a week now, and I'm getting the itch again, and so I've got to get writing.

I'm thinking something shorter than a novel. I've got an agent to sell those now; what I want is something I can publish myself, put out and sell right away. (The money's nice on traditional publishing. The waiting isn't.) I've got a few ideas, one that I'm working on with Peter is to put together a pair or trio of novellas with a particular (perhaps secret? Don't know so won't say it) theme. I'm thinking it'll end up in the 15-20K word range. But there are other novella length things that I contemplate.

I have the start of a novella about the later years of Morgan le Fay, sitting at about 10K and needing probably 30K. That's too short for traditional publishing, too long for magazines, the perfect length to self publish. I love the Arthurian legends, and I've been meaning to finish this thing for a great many years. When I started it (so long ago was that date) it seemed like it would be a great achievement to finish it. I have advanced much beyond that point now, but I still want to get back to it and wrap it up.

Or I could write an interpretation of the myth of Orpheus that's bouncing around in my head. I think it's just a little too thin to be a novel length work; it would be a good novella, but just not meaty enough for more.

Or the sci fi piece about abandoned terraformers. Again, it's too thin for a novel, but probably more than enough to get to 20K words.

All together, those four would be about 80K words, or about the length of the novel I just wrapped up. So that wouldn't really take long, and it would be four pieces of work that I could do things with promptly.

I think I like that plan. I think I'm on it.

How to Be Slightly Inaccurate, Historically; and Why

I'm spending a lot of time trying to be a good person as a writer. I'm trying to make sure my writing is at least a little representative of the world as I'd like to have it. Stronger women, gentler men, more minorities, that sort of thing. It's not very hard to do, and not something that is often out of place. But there are moments when I grow a bit concerned, as with my current work in progress.

I'm writing historical dark fairy tale stuff, set in 16th Century rural Austria. Women had rather limited roles there and then, and so I'm reasonably limited in what I can have my female characters do. I know of course that women in real history did all sorts of remarkable things all the time: ruled countries, fought in battles, ran their estates, things that are often overlooked or forgotten. So I can have all that happen, but it doesn't seem like quite enough to me.

Then of course I think about the writing of the last century or two, by men especially. Where women seldom appeared in anything but a moral or supporting role, and did little or nothing of note for the story. Only in dramatic pieces could women be real characters, and then their actions were still strongly limited and curtailed. They might feel real, but they were just as evidently trapped, caged by society. And while this is predominantly historically true, it wasn't always so.

So I think about it, and I realize that if I just keep the characters interesting, and on the edge of the "historically" possible, I'm doing pretty well. I'll do more in other places, other works. History sets limits that can't really be contravened entirely, and I'm not going to. But I will make every effort to step right up to the boundary, and possible slip a toe across now and then. I'd feel bad if I did anything less, and like I was failing as a writer. It seems a small thing, but I have a platform, and I'd rather use it to try to change attitudes than to support a worn out status quo.

Novel Experience

I wrote a book for National Novel Writing Month, which I'm having read by people just now. That's not new: I pretty much always write a book in November, and most of them are complete, and read, and in many cases ready to go for publishing, if not already published.

All well and good, but that seems to be a bad habit to have gotten in to. I seem to be fixated on the notion of writing books in November: while I can do short stories, and editing, and that sort of thing, I have had very limited success in writing novels at other times of the year in a very long while. But I'm feeling a little confident right now. I'm about half way through another novel that I started eighteen days ago, 34000 words almost, and I think that I'm liking it, and that it's a pretty decent thing as well. With luck, with good effort, and with positive feedback I might finish the thing, which would delightful.

Another new thing, this one completely new, is that I'm having people read the book as I write it. I don't do this. I don't ever do this. Every time I've ever done this, it's resulted in me not finishing the book. I don't know why. Possibly it's because I like to talk, and like to talk about what I'm writing, and don't like to know how things I'm writing will end up. That's a bad combination, because I'll talk, and then talk about the book, and then tell people how I think it will go. And then I will stop writing. This time, though, I'm managing to let people read it, and even field a few questions, offer a few hints, and not completely lose the interest in work.

It's a new feeling for me. I needed to get used to doing it, though, as I'm about to start editing my novel for my publisher, and when that happens, I'm going to need to not lose interest in the work because someone's reading it. So this is good practice.

It's also kind of scary. The book, I mean, not the process. Though there's some of that, too.

NaNoWriMo is over

Another year, another novel. I set out with some goals for the novel, and here's how that played out:

1) Finish it. Managed this one with a few hours to spare. It's 69.4K words, which isn't as long as an adult fantasy novel should be, but much will be added in edits, so that's not a big problem.
2) Produce a strong, non-stereotyped female lead. I think I did a good job on this, but only reading it will tell. One's memory of a novel as it is written is a bit strange.
3) Set up the possibility for a series of one shots in the same world/with the same characters. Done, and done.
4) Create a convincing world. Um...5 out of 10, maybe? 4 out of 10? This needs some work. A lot of good ideas, but many of them not realized until late in the book, so that I've got to go back and fill in many details in earlier portions. Also, finally realized that the flavor of the book is off, so I'm changing that, too, from slightly-off-of-generic European Fantasy Land, to the more fitting and satisfying suggestive-of-East-Asia Fantasy Land.
5) Represent people of color. Slight success. Improvement spots already noted, and will be made to happen.
6) Manage to not hate the story. Well...working on that, still. We'll see how it plays out. Fix it in post, right?

All of which means, I've got a hunk of book. Medieval city based fantasy with focus on religion and magic and two MCs and a nebulously developed world that needs a lot of work and naming conventions that need to be stabilized and improved and word choices that really need to be expanded for certain words.

Not my best NaNo. Probably my worst. But also the one which I actually had goals for beyond finishing, and that makes it trickier, it appears.

I'm setting it aside until later, and then I'll read and start to fix. Next year, probably, early, but I can't be sure. Whenever I'm ready, and it's ready, and I'm not editing for publication on other books.

National Novel Writing Month

There's this thing called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for shorter, which I do. Or have done. Or something. I think the first time I did it was in 2004, though I may be wrong, it might have been 2003. All records of the period have grown sketchy, and the computers I wrote on then, which might have contained such information, are corrupted and long dead. In any case, from that point I've given it at least a shot every year: try to write a novel of at least 50000 words in one month (November).

There's been a good amount of success. Two years ago I wrote Engines of the Broken World; a couple edits later, it got bought by a publisher, and looks likely to make its way to shelves in time for NaNo 2012 (or maybe 2013, the timing on publishing being not an exact science). 2006 was Daughter of Cleopatra, which I've epublished; 2010 was Never, which is probably my favorite of all the things I've written, and is also readily available. Other years brought Speech of Angels, being edited and polished, and the House of the Serpent, ditto (though it needs much more editing and polishing). There was the year I was at sea, and didn't finish anything (sad year for NaNo, but hell, I was sailing around the world, and I was pretty impressed that I even gave it a shot).

This year I'm getting married in November. That takes up, as you  may know and can certainly imagine, a goodly bit of time in the lead up, and then there's a honeymoon after. So it's not going to be the best month for writing a book. But I'm still going to give it a try, and see what comes. I suspect another failed attempt, and I won't much blame myself for it. One must, however, make the attempt. And so should you, dear readers, if the least hint of being a novelist has entered your head.

One month. One book. It's a hard equation to master, but simple in concept.

A Thousand Words

Some time ago - all right, it wasn't that long, but bear with me here - I wrote the Great American Novel. It wasn't set in America, and it may or may not be great, but it was, in very fact, a novel. Weighing in at roughly 111,000 words, it's arguably quite a long novel for the Young Adult Fantasy genre.

I find myself bemused to note that the name of the novel, Grimme, is very close indeed to an eponymous television series that just began serialization: "Grimm." The TV show is all about someone who suddenly becomes aware that his many-times-great grandfather was one of the original Brothers Grimm and he must now go fight monsters (I paraphrase wildly, but you get the gist I'm sure). Strangely enough, this too is modestly close to the ideas touched on by my novel - not precisely, but not so far off either.

And yes, this leads to bemusement for me. Am I, as has been the case several times this year, tuned closely in to the spirit of the times? Does my muse whisper to me what will be popular next season? (Would that were the case!) Perhaps. But in this time I am reminded that there are relatively few truly original ideas left under the sun, perhaps none at all; and that it is how we execute those ideas that makes our writing worthy of being read. The "great stories" are all great exactly because they speak to something universal in human experience, so it is natural that we would go back to them again and again, seeking the truths they contain.

Perhaps that is the case with Grimme, and the new television show Grimm. Or perhaps not. But in the mean time, you are invited to feast your eyes on the lovely map drawn for the alterate-Europe setting of Grimme. Done by hand by the multi-talented Jason Vanhee, it uses archaic or non-English names for many of the regions of Europe. I'm quite pleased by it, and grateful that my writing cohort has such a rich store of artistic ability upon which I may occasionally draw. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case it will help me summarize over a hundred thousand words - and my gratitude is commensurate with that ratio.

Look for more Grimme developments soon!

Walking off of cliffs, and climbing back up them

Having gotten bogged down in dissatisfaction with the current work in progress, I've done almost nothing on it in perhaps 10 days. Three pages, maybe, and I don't much like them. Or not that I don't much like them, but that, well, I don't much like the whole thing anymore.

In writing circles, there are those who plot out carefully, often called (surprise) plotters, and those who work best on the fly, often called pantsers (as in, seat of the pants). I fall strongly into the pantser category, preferring to just write, and thinking that everything will work out. That's usually true, but sometimes you realize partway into something that you've got it all wrong. You realize, perhaps, that the church in your world should not be just a pale shadow of the Catholic church with a few extras and accessories to make it different. Perhaps it should be vaguely modeled on that most ancient of churches, but with vast and varied changes. All of which only occurred to me 75 pages into the story, and which would require a complete reworking of almost everything to incorporate them.

Thus, I realize I've done myself a bad turn. I've rendered the story lifeless and silly in my eyes, and have walked off a cliff of my own making. Or flung myself off it, really, so that I'm now plunging into an abyss of stupid prose.

Two choices exist (three really, but the third is starting a new work, and that's out for purposes of this discussion). I can either go back and make the changes (long, tiring, liable to mistakes), or I can start all over again (frustrating to have to do, but potentially vastly liberating). I'm choosing the latter: the mothball the current WIP and leave it as is, under a drop cloth in case I need anything from it; at the same time, I'll start the new WIP, which is the old one transformed using my new ideas and knowledge. I'm casting off 20000 words, but if I do it write, they'll come back quickly enough. I have characters I enjoy, and they can come with me, as can much of the setting. But the culture, that's what I'm changing, and it needs the change to give the piece some life. Life, and internal consistency: there's no way a pale shadow of the Catholic church would be sufficient to the needs of this world, or that such a church could have even really evolved.

So, I look up from the abyss, and set to climbing out of holes of my own making. Hopefully I've got the correct gear for it. More updates as I succeed, or perhaps even fail. Failure, though, also has value. Lessons will be learned either way. But here's hoping for success all the same.

We Are The 99% (of writers)

I'm not talking about finance here. Or in a sense, I am. I'm talking about writers. And I am, Peter is, you are if you're reading this, one of the 99%. I can say this with confidence, because I know Stephen King isn't reading this; I know J. K. Rowling isn't reading this. We lowly working class writers, the ones who make little or no money, who can only dream of anything like success, we are the majority. The vast masses of those who work with words.

What does this have to do with protests, with opposition to Wall Street, with anything that would make it worthwhile to co-opt a slogan for a title? Well, the main thing is this: we all of us want things to change. And we none of us know exactly what we can make change. Do we have goals, do we have dreams, can we even, to some degree, express them? Of course. But there's nothing exactly we can do, right?

That's no more true for a working class writer than it is for a working class American, though. We can get out there and make some noise: call attention to ourselves and to others like us, try to shed some light on our problems and on our accomplishments. We can band together, because a group of voices can be heard more than one lone crier in the wild. We can hope for improvement, that we'll be heard and results will happen.

The odds of success seem slim, of course. But we each of us have some this far: we've written a book, or more than one. We've decided to put it out there. That's the hardest part. The rest is just luck, or fate, hard work or determination.

We'll never be the 1%. It's not going to happen. But we can, just maybe, succeed better than we might dream.

Happy accidents

I recently had the thought, "A botched plot never boils."

It can happen to any writer. You have your setting, and your characters, and your mood/theme/soapbox. You have a plot arc, nice and neat, with interesting twists and character development along the way to the lovely, satisfying conclusion. You already have ideas for the sequel.

And then something throws you a curve ball.

Maybe one of your characters took it into his head to do something unplanned. Maybe what you had in mind didn't ring true to the motivations of the character. Maybe you got a better idea in the middle of writing the piece and brought in a new thread that suddenly dangled in front of your face, asking none too politely What are you going to do with me?

What happens when a writer writes himself into a corner?

The short answer is: profanity.

The longer answer is: re-writing. Sometimes you just have to give up on some words, cut them out with regret, and start over. It's often painful, but sometimes the original idea was the better one, and this Brilliant New Idea that crammed itself into your eyeballs was a red herring.

But sometimes...

There's a Mexican folk saying, No plan works out perfectly, but every plan works out. Once you take out the artificial need for perfection, for exact adherence to the original plan simply because it was the original, the writer is freed to pursue something more rare and evanescent in their writing than a dry, sterile plot arc or fever chart. The intangible, the unplanned is unpredictable and you cannot count on it - but if you embrace it, you can turn profanity into la découverte joyeuse - the happy accident.

Acts of Creation

One of the things most enjoyable about writing, to me, is creating. Making a world. Or at least a sliver of one. A whole world would be almost inconcievable, of course. Even the most well realized alternate worlds are pastiches of our world, liberally spiced with innovation but still closely hewing to what we know. It can't be much different, or else the reader wouldn't have anything to latch on to, the very words being used wouldn't have much meaning. But still, if one creates a world, it's a good thing.
Then there's using our own world, and merely (I say merely, as if it were easy) depicting some portion of it well and deeply. Still, even in dealing with real people and real places, one is making them over, recreating them. It's different, but an act of creation all the same.
The amount of work and effort is much the same either way, to be honest. There's more structure and less freedom in setting a story in a known place; you have to obey rules that are already determined for you before you begin, and you have to be true, or truthy at least, to known constants. But you can just look up those constants, and you have things to build on reasonably easily. Making something from whole cloth really lets your creativity run wild, and there are no rules but what you set up for yourself, which is nice. Only you have to make it all up; there's no further authority, nothing you can consult but your own muse. You end up, either way, with problems, and with delights.
I'm in the way of creating anew right now. Doing some serious making up, while, as noted, dragging bits of our world, our history, this or that culture, along with me and trying to put them in where they might be of use. Sometimes the bits fit well, and sometimes a little less well, and you try to make it all work. I've done the other way too, and I like it, but it's not as liberating. You get the sense when making it all up that really anything could happen. (That's not true, as I noted. Not anything at least. Many strange things, and wonderful, but not any and all.)
I guess I'm about 20% to the length I'd like to get to. Longer is fine, but shorter wouldn't really thrill me. And at a fifth of the work, I'd think it would be good to have some idea what I was aiming for, where the end might eventually be. As a writer I don't like going too far down that road, knowing secrets and endings. I like to be surprised as much as the next guy. But I usually have a general idea of what I want to get to, and I don't know even that much yet. There are so many options.
I'm concerned it will get away from me. That I'll end up someplace too terribly weird, or too terribly banal. That I'll build up too much junk that neither I nor any reader could care about. That I'll grow bored with the lack of action, or too much action, and just stop.
Memory suggests that I often have these fears, and I've often gotten by them without much trouble. So here's hoping.

Setting out on a new path

We've spent seemingly forever on the anthologie. That's not true at all. We only came up with the idea back in June, were done with getting submissions by the end of July, and here it is, still technically summer, and it's a done deal. Not four months from start to finish, a really rapid turn around. What with all the work we had to cram into those months, though, and all the actually day-jobbery, and so on and so forth, it seems rather longer. So it's good to be able to put that behind me and move on.

I haven't been spending much time on my own writing. I put out a novella to add into the anthologie, sure, and I wrote a bit on this or that project, but nothing serious. I'm primarily now a novelist, and since June, I've done no novel writing on any notable level. Which is bad; even though I have a backlog of works, I should be producing new ones, no? So now I've started on that, hopefully. You never know what will amount to anything, even as your work count grows. Until you're done, you can't even guess if it'll be finished. I've gotten things to within thirty or so pages of completion (fifty? a hundred? being incomplete, I can't know) and then been unable or unwilling to finish them. So I don't count on anything. But I'm working on something now, that isn't for any anthology or project. Just for me, and my career, as it may be perhaps over-generously described. I'm not going to say much about it, and not going to post anything about it, but it's happening. And it feels good.

Less than four months for the anthologie. Let's see if it can be less than four months for this one, too.

Daily Vocabulary

episodic: Containing or consisting of a series of loosely connected parts or events. One could speak of Flash Gordon in the early radio serials, of Sherlock Holmes in the stories, even of the works of Dickens, published in parts every month, so that people waited at the docks in New York for the arrival of the latest portion, crying out "What happened to Little Nell?" Modern television is of course almost completely in this vein, as are web comics and almost all other cultural items consumed by the populace. But in fiction, much of the time there aren't episodes. A good number of books stand completely alone, including all of my currently available stuff. In speculative fiction, series of whatever nature are quite common, indeed expected; but episodic ones are not common. A Game of Thrones, currently terribly popular, isn't actually episodic. Or if it is, one could say it has two episodes, the first and second trilogies (using the word loosely, as the second trilogy will likely actually be five books). But there are a good number of fine episodic series: Discworld by Terry Pratchett; Xanth by Piers Anthony (I speak only of the first half dozen or so, after which I cannot defend it); the Garrett Files by Glen Cook. Many more exist, and I think they are a strong type, stronger, probably, than the endless march of trilogies. Trilogies so often let one down by the end; moreso if the series is longer still. But episodes, they do very well by themselves, one after another, and it is hard to hate them for failing you. They seldom do.

One of my many writing deficiencies, discussed

I don't really write series. I'm not built for it as a writer, I don't think. I have difficulty constructing and working with very long narratives. In truth, I like things short and lean and sleek, and a series aims for the opposite. As a reader, however, I like them well enough. I've torn through massive multivolume epics time and again, from my first great literary love The Lord of the Rings on to more modern fare like Steven Erikson's The Malazan Book of the Fallen. But in the main I agree strongly with this article, in that it's all too easy to go astray. A Game of Thrones is doing it; the Wheel of Time did it but might somehow still be salvaged (though I doubt it), and the Malazan series, clocking in at 10 books, should have stopped at 8. But I keep trying them, keep reading them and seeing if a writer can make it work. There are successes, yes, but I think they only work if they clock in at about three books; almost anything more manages to muddle things up. Perhaps some day I'll be bold or foolish enough to give it a try myself; I've had a notion here and there, but the execution always so far has failed me. If I do, though, I'll stick with tradition, and just do three books. Three is plenty.

Daily Vocabulary

Labor, or labour if one favors the Anglo spelling: productive work, especially physical toil done for wages; or those who perform such work. Also, the process of childbirth; and related, at least metaphorically, something done for pleasure rather than gain (as in a labor of love).

Few words run such a gamut of meanings and are yet so intimately tied to our everyday lives. Most of us labor for a living, yet few do so manually in this day and age because such activities are more often done more cheaply, and efficiently, by machines. Labor itself has changed. Our labor is often not of muscle but of intellect: 'knowledge workers' is a modern contrivance communicating this shift. Whether it is in the ephemeral transactions of customer service, the abstractions of finance and law, or the crafting of the written word, we labor as hard as previous generations ever did - if only in mind, rather than in body.

For writers this is especially true - many of us labor to bring ideas themselves into existence, partaking of both the 'childbirth' and 'labor of love' aspects of the word. We write to give birth to the fruits of our imaginations, and we love what we do despite the effort and dedication and patience it requires. No few of us would be far happier to dig a ditch or split logs for a few hours rather than go through another editing session! But of such timber are our word-temples built, and with such sweat do our words coalesce from the aether of imagination to appear, solid and substantial, from the amorphous mists of the creative process. And if anyone tells you this is not a labor - of love or otherwise - they may safely be called a stinkin' liar.

The Continuum of Words

I'm not sure if the average person is aware, but there are debates within book publishing as petty and pointless as ever the early Catholic Church thought up. In the age of ebooks, some of these debates can become almost of critical importance, because everything one puts up as an ebook is effectively self-described. So how you define things is of great importance, because if you use the wrong term, you may be thought of as wrong (or to pursue the Church analogy, heretical) and punished for your crime (sin).

I speak, of course, of the length of your piece, and how you thus describe it.

There is only two categories, the uninitiated might think: a short story, and a novel. But this would be wrong, and exactly how one defines the stuff in between (or even those two end points) determines the degree of heresy. At the top squats that novel: ponderous, weighty, with no real upper limit, but certainly a lower. What defines a novel is length, few would argue, but what's the bottom edge? Some say 50000 words (which is the definition assigned by NaNoWriMo), and would include just about every book you've ever read. But not quite all; there are a few, like The Old Man and the Sea, that fall below that threshold. And in Young Adult fiction, you can get away with a 40000 word novel and no one blinks. So even that low edge is a bit vague and ragged.

Below the novel but above the short story are several categories poorly defined and uncertain in nature. They are often seen but seldom measured. The novella comes next. Sometimes, it fills the entirety of space between novels and short stories: anything from about 10K to about 40K words. But some people think that it has to be more like 15 or even 20 thousands words to get the novella designation. So under that there is another named category, the novelette. It isn't a popular designation. I don't know anyone who uses it, but the Nebula Awards enjoy it as a category. Maybe they just wanted to be able to give out more awards, like the Best Animated Movie for the Oscars. Anyway, the novelette is sometimes defined as anything above 7500 words, but below 15 or 20 thousand. It's not well known, and not much spotted in nature.

Just for reference, a standard page in a book comes in at maybe 300 words, depending on how much dialogue there is. So a novel must be perhaps 180 or 200 pages; a novella can drop to as little as 30 or so, but the novelette lives in the 25 to 50 pages category overlapping the novella. All right, on to short stories. That should be simple, right?

Nope. There's the short story, which is technically anything that is a story, and that clocks in at under 10K words (or 15, or 20, depending on where your novella category ends). But there are subsets. A short short story is a category that includes anything that's under 1000 words, or about 3 pages at most. But there's the even shorter category of microfiction, which is half that length, or a third: under 500, or maybe 300, words. Flash Fiction is even tinier: perhaps 50 or so words, with one definition stating that it must be 55, no more and no less.  And then come the arguments over what is a word: do hyphenates count as one or two (there is disagreement, and it depends on what's hyphenated, is the answer), for instance.

One must be very clear when one defines a work. But one man's clarity is another man's obfuscation. So I think the best choice is to just pick one that feels right, and then state the word count, and then move on with your life. If you've been as clear as you can be, no one can really trash you for misleading them (though I'm told they still, in a few cases, will do so. "This wasn't long enough for the price" is a common complaint, or "I wish I had known how short it was before I bought it".)

To recap, from longest (normally defined) length to shortest: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Short Short Story, Microfiction, Flash Fiction. All of them overlapping and blending, causing confusion wherever they are deployed. But that's the way of things, right?

10% chance of horrible success

I've done Nanowrimo several times. Some six or seven, perhaps. All three of the novels I've put out on the Kindle are Nanonovels. I'm pleased with that result, but I know it's not typical. I do good work under time pressure, and so I do well in a month long writing contest. But some challenges are too much. The 3 Day Novel Contest is just about as ridiculous as words can manage: you take Labor Day weekend, and you write a novel. You send it in, it gets judged, winners get prizes. Of course, you pay a registration fee to do this, and you have only 72 hours total. Seventy two. Seven, two. That's it. To get even a short novel (let's say Nano length, 50k words) you need to write on the order of 600 or 700 words an hour. Which is only two or three pages. Every hour though, for the full period. No sleep, no socialization, nothing, at that pace. If you do it in only 36 hours out of that 72, however, you just have to write a mere 1400 words an hour. 5 pages an hour. That's quite a lot. So...I'm not doing it. It's crazy. But if you're up for it, you can still register as late as Friday, and then you can drive yourself mad at leisure in a week more.

One's Next Project

I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that I'm not alone in my current conundrum: what to write next.

It's not that I lack for ideas. If anything, there are too many. But that, for me at least, has always been the case.
But no, the lack or presence of ideas is not what I'm pondering. It's the proper order of things. When I consider what project to work on next (beyond the editing/formating/publishing of works which are already in essence complete) I have to consider a number of factors.

1) What I'm interested in. Not all ideas are created equal, and some of what I could write, I don't really want to. I can't picture sustaining my own attention over the amount of time (a month, three months, what have you) that a first draft would take me. Likely I would prove myself wrong: almost anything becomes interesting once you're really working on it. But that's the problem. I would have to start working on something, and it had better, at least at first, interest me.

2) What I think has value, that is, what I could sell. Pet projects are nice, and there are some things I've written that I know are just too particular/strange/pointlessly attuned to me/whatever that I'm certain there's no market for them. This didn't used to be a problem. I wasn't selling anything at all, and I didn't have to worry about whether something would sell. Now, of course, I do sell some books (not a lot, but see my next reason), so I actually have to think about what could sell when I'm all done with it.

3) What I think not just could, but will sell. I have some notion, faint as it is, of what I am selling. So I have some idea that if I produce something similar, such a thing might also sell. Which means it's not just whether I'm interested, and whether other people could be interested, but whether they in fact have shown an interest.

So I have to decide: do I write something new that I find interesting but that is totally unproven? (I've got two of those that I could start working on right away.) Do I write something connecting to something that may or may not have any real value because the first book isn't necessarily doing great? (I've got one of those.) Or do I go with something that my evidence suggests will do the best, but which, frankly, I've tried working no before and not really liked.

The one thing I know is, after some months of mostly editing/formatting/cover designing/etc, I've really got to get back to writing on a longer project, and promptly. So I have to make the choice, and soon. But not, I think, today.

I'm more of a Beethoven

Slate again.  They've got good writing stuff at the moment.  Which is great.  This one is about writing quickly, or at least, getting a lot done in a short while.  I've done that, in fits and spurts.  It's fun.  But sometimes it's tough. I have long dry spells, too.  So these tips, maybe they'll come in handy.