The period of time after I have finished one writing project and before I have found my way to the next is always a fraught one.  I pack a manuscript off to my editor after many months, sometimes years, of immersion and wake the next morning to a vacuum.  A vacuum filled with questions.

“Why am I here?”

“What am I supposed to be doing?”

“Will I ever write anything again?”

I used to be convinced that every project I finished would be my last.

Once I even announced that “fact” in a public lecture.  “My career is over,” I told my audience.  “I have nothing more to say."

I stopped announcing that after my partner replied, “Yes, I know.  You say that every time.”

I was amazed.  I didn’t remember ever feeling that particular despair before!

But even though I’ve stopped complaining—out loud, anyway—about finding myself in this amorphous place, that doesn’t mean I live through it easily.  I still struggle.

When I was writing novels exclusively, I used to solve the problem by curling up in a corner of the couch and reading.  Novel after novel after novel.  Day after day after day.  Eventually, I’d hit on something—an authorial voice, a moving scene, an intriguing character—that would propel me back into my own work.

It isn’t that I began writing again in imitation of what I’d been reading.  Not at all.  Something—sometimes I didn’t know exactly what it was—about my reading energized me, and out of that energy my own characters, my own scenes, my own voice would begin to flow.

Now that I’m working in a wider range of genres, I find stoking new ideas more complicated.  I have recently written three nonfiction picture books on three very different topics.  (The Stuff of Stars and two that are in the pipeline still.)  I struggled with writing them and loved every minute of the struggle and want to do more.  Once I find the right topic.

So this time, searching for a new idea, I am reading a wide range of nonfiction, everything from quantum physics to the life-cycle of mushrooms to a book about crows.

But the search is complicated by the fact that I’m not limiting the possibilities to nonfiction picture books.  There are other genres calling to me, too.  Like the memoir I worked on intensively several years ago and then set aside.  The first time around I failed to find a hook that could make my life interesting to strangers.  I might have found that hook now, but a more personal question flummoxes me.

Do I want to step out from behind the safe scrim of fiction?  I grow less brave every time that question presents itself.

Still . . . I have a whole stack of memoirs next to my reading chair, and I am reading them, too.

Then there is the YA novel, also cast aside several years ago with nearly 200 pages drafted.  I abandoned it for serious reasons.  Do I dare return to it now?

Or if fiction is what draws me, perhaps I should turn to something younger.  Something with a cleaner, simpler line.

But with what story?

The only way I know to come up with an answer is to immerse myself in other people’s work.  So I read novels, too, struggling to define what I’m searching for.

I’ll know it when I see it, though.  Won’t I?

Sometimes I feel as though I’m floating in a cloud of ideas, fascinating ideas, but bewildering, too.  Too much choice can feel like no choice at all.

So that’s the way I’m living my days in the confinement of Covid 19.  Reading.  Asking questions.  Reading.  Walking.  Reading.  Breathing.  Reading.  Cooking.  Reading.  Zooming.  Reading some more.

It’s not a bad way to live.  In a time when so many are suffering, I never forget how profoundly privileged I am.  I live every moment of every day in gratitude for this good life.

But oh . . . when, at last, I can dip my toes into the cold water of a new project, how I will rejoice!

At least until I finish it, turn it over to agent and editor, and the search begins again.