Tuesday, April 06, 2010

I'm taller!

Well, probably not really, but I turned my book in last week on Thursday (at approximately 8:05 p.m.) and immediately felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I'd grown an inch or two.

Normally, I take a week or two off after finishing a book. I don't have that luxury this time. I need to get to work immediately on the next project. At this point, I can't even remember the names of the characters and am having to reread the proposal so I know what it is I said I was going to write.

I was worried that there would be a certain amount of brain drain (and maybe there is a little, hence the fact that I'm posting this way later than I usually do), that I might not be able to plunge from one project to another. Apparently I'm getting better at the switch from one genre to the other and I'm now all excited about the new book and can't wait to get to it.

I think it might be possible that taking off the week or two between projects wasn't a good idea. Often the two weeks would stretch to three or more. I always felt sluggish when I finally got my started with the new one. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to turn off my author brain and rest it.

We'll see at the end of the summer. If my brain has totally overheated and I'm blowing gaskets, I'll know that those two weeks off helped at some point.

4 comments:

Maureen McGowan said...

Congrats, Eileen!

And I'm still on the fence about the time off thing, too. All those creativity coach type people say you need to write every day, even if it's just for a short while, but my experience doing back-to-back books with no break just about killed me. Maybe it's an intensity thing. Or attitude. I was panicked from day one. Didn't help. Or maybe it did. LOL. It's possible I couldn't have done it without the panic.

Eileen said...

I'd love to figure out a way to harness and ride the panic. It's wonderfully motivating, but also a little destructive.

Anonymous said...

Congrats Eileen, I'm on the fence as well.
I need some time in between where I'm only thinking about one book, and not editing one and brainstorming another.

Molly O'Keefe said...

Hey! Congrats on finishing the rewrites - I am curious about all of this too since it looks like I have a busy year ahead of me. The pacing issue and the breaks issue are going to be adjustments for me I think.

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