You know that feeling you get, when you’re nearing the end of reading a book, and you’re starting to think about what to read next, and you just–don’t know?  And then you finish the book, and it’s time to pick a new one to read, and it’s just so freaking hard?  Like, sometimes I put two or three books in my bag because who knows?  Who the hell knows what I actually want to read next?  When I pack for vacations, I always pack anywhere between 3-5 books, which is just absurd, okay, because no one actually reads when they’re on vacation, but I still do it.  Because I start thinking, well, I’ll probably want to read YA, but what kind of YA?  Maybe romance, but maybe also magic, so might as well pack both.  But I’m nearly always in the mood for an astronaut biography, and sometimes the mood just slams me in the face and won’t go away, so I’ll need one of those, and then probably an adult fiction novel just in case.  And it’s just like?  I’m going away for a week.  What the actual heck?  But I don’t know!

I just finished rereading Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, and I kid you not, I pulled four books off my shelf to try to decide what to read next.  I’m in the middle of making my way through Oscar Wilde’s collected works, so I thought, heck, I’ll keep that out in case the mood strikes me.  Erin got me Dodie’s book, too, and I’m really interested to see what that is, so might as well hang out with that, too.  But I think I want to reread the entire Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy this year instead of just Shiver, so I took down Linger.  And the astronaut biography vibe is starting to circle back around, but not in a huge way, so I picked up See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng, too, which is a middle reader, and I’m only 50 pages into it, but let me tell you, it’s getting five freaking stars, my friend.  Hey, uh, you remember that Gilmore Girls episode where, wow, I’m actually Rory Gilmore, but with a little punk rock thrown in?

This is how I feel about my writing right now.

Like, that actual mess of stream of consciousness.  My brain is just a bunch of Hulk fists smashing together and the static noise on radios and that really annoying flickering bulb that you can’t fix.

I don’t want to be writing right now, but I want to be writing soon, and I’m in that limbo where I’m not sure what I want to be writing, you know?  Because I’d like to write the first of the Pen boys summer novellas, but I was also thinking about Andrew the vampire detective this morning, except I was talking about Shri the other day, and you know what, I have this secret bookstore romance idea that is haunting my dreams, but sometimes I also think about the Henry/Cole Saints at sea novel that I definitely can’t write until the second Saints book is done, and wow actually the second Saints novel kind of sounds like a good idea, too, AND OH LET’S NOT FORGET ABOUT COMET NOVEL.

CALM DOWN, BRAIN.

None of these are even Mason, and that’s the most frustrating part.

I don’t know what I want to write next, and I hate this limbo feeling.  I’m enjoying taking a break, and realistically, I do know what’s coming next.  My plan is to edit Alex the Destroyer next, and I’m sticking with that no matter what because I’ve been listening to his kind of music nonstop for the last couple weeks, and I keep thinking about him, so I want to finally wrap up his story and write those missing six chapters.  But that’s not going to take much longer than two weeks, so what’s next?  Right now, I’ve got plenty to distract myself with.  There are a ton of books still left on my 2017 TBR, and while I’ve finally accepted that I’m not going to read all of them before the end of the year, I still want to read all of them.  I’ve also been possibly bitten by the James Bond fanfiction writing bug, too, so if that turns into anything beyond rereading my old fic, that’ll keep me busy for threeish weeks, probably.  But I have less than zero idea what I want to write next.  I know that this blog is similar because I wrote something like this in-between the end of Alex and the beginning of Saints, when I was swimming around feeling unsettled, but it’s just so frustrating to be here again.  I have all these ideas, and none of them are jumping out at me.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Practice what you preach, am I right?  I always tell my students during yoga to let whatever happens happen.  One of these ideas will unravel eventually.