Well, I’m back from vacation . . . if that’s what it can be called.  I haven’t been anywhere, of course. In this fraught time, I simply fell into a place where I could not write.  Anything!  Not a new manuscript.  Not even a blog.

I’m not sure anyone noticed I was gone since I’ve been posting quotes here on my website instead, something I do between blogs anyway.  And who besides me is going to notice that last week was a quote, too?

I’ve talked to other writers having the same experience, finding themselves unable to write in this collapsing world. Unable to write anything.

And not-writing is a perilous place to exist for those of us who rise every day for the precise purpose of gathering words and putting them to some use.

Years ago I heard of a study that discovered that, for people who write every day, the act of writing releases serotonin in the brain.  Since everybody loves serotonin, writing becomes addictive! 

A positive addiction certainly.  Or at least the addicted ones consider it positive.  Sometimes those who live with us have a rather different view.

But the downside of that addiction—as with any other—is that withdrawal is really, really hard.  For months, I’ve been waking to a world devoid of purpose and struggling to keep afloat.

Usually, when I finish one manuscript I am ready, or very close to being ready, to start another.  This time I finished without a single new idea in my head.

I had three possibilities, but nothing would emerge through the isolation of COVID-19 or the chaos of the world around me.

One idea I’ve explored was another scientifically based picture book such as The Stuff of Stars and two other picture book texts I’ve sold more recently.  But to attempt to write such a thing, nonscientist that I am, I have to fall in love with the spirit behind a set of scientific facts.  And this time the more I read, the more not-in-love I felt.  In fact, in-love-with didn’t even seem possible.

The second was to return to the memoir in verse I abandoned several years ago.  I set it aside because, after many months of work, I never found the hook that could capture readers who have no personal interest in my life.  Which is, of course, the vast majority of possible readers. 

I considered the memoir seriously for a while.  I even found a possible hook.  But what I found made me realize why I’ve worked behind the scrim of fiction all my adult life.  When I write, whether memoir or fiction, I write from the heart.  It’s all I know how to do.  But that doesn’t mean I want to send my heart marching out there naked before the world. Especially not this world!

I set the memoir aside.

My last choice was to return to a young adult novel I worked on a number of years ago.  I had set it aside partly to move on to the memoir, which called more strongly at the time, and partly because I was beginning to feel aspects of my story were outside of my control.  Certain that I would never return to it, I discarded my research materials in the fatigue of a move. 

But that novel was all I had in my head, so I started over.  I renewed my research, changed my perspective, reshaped my way of telling, streamlined the story, and discovered that in the years since the novel had overwhelmed me my capacity for overwhelm hadn’t diminished.  It had, in fact, grown more acute.  Time to acknowledge the limitations of an 82-year-old brain.

So I boxed it all up, sealed it, and this time put it away in the basement.  It will all go into recycling eventually.  Without the fatigue of a move to propel me, I don’t have the heart to do that yet.

Which means I spent months waking each morning to no purpose at all.

From time to time I tried a blog but got nowhere.  Is there anything more boring than writing about not writing?  Maybe reading about not writing is worse.

And then . . . slowly, slowly, while much remained unchanged in the outer world, the sun began to glow at the horizon.  I had an idea.  Just a scrap of an idea, really.  I still don’t know where it will take me.  But it’s a beginning. 

Here’s the first chapter.  The whole first chapter.

Chapter 1:

She was a girl.

Just an ordinary girl.

Except for the wings.

Now I wake in the morning with energy again.  Serotonin trickles through my brain.  A girl, just an ordinary girl, stretches her wings. Maybe she will figure out how to fly in the midst of a pandemic!

It’s what I wish for every struggling writer out there.  Wings!