Made some serious progress on plotting out this novel and deciding how it ends this weekend, but this morning woke feeling disconnected again, halfway hopeless, wondering if I’m making any sense on the page. I’m guessing I’m just anxious about submission time, whenever that will be, and making excuses to prolong this in-between stage where nothing is happening yet and there’s no reason to stress.

You see, before we go out on submission with this novel all I can do is imagine how it will be. I can hope, and I can picture it, and I can pretend, and I can do it all safely from my seat at this desk where nothing bad can possibly happen. It’s this thing I can see far out in the distance, if I squint. And I don’t have to look if I don’t want to.

Right now, there are no reality checks, no tough decisions, no anxious waiting after answers.

I don’t know how being out on submission will feel—when I sent DANI NOIR out, it was to an editor I was already working with on it, and she had my back, and I didn’t send it to anyone else at all. The whole thing caught me by surprise with DANI. This is probably going to be immensely more stressful.

You know what? I’m just going to spend the week working on this plot and not think of what could possibly happen in the future.

I can’t know.

I don’t want to know.

When do writers relax? Is there a point after you sell the book, between deadlines, before reviews, and before people actually read it, when you can just take a nice little nap or something?
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* Apparently this is a reoccurring theme in my writing life. I’ve already written a post with this exact same title!