When Isaac Asimov finished a book he used to put a fresh piece of paper into his typewriter and write a short story, then if he had time a science article that way he didn’t have to make two (or three) trips to the mailbox.
I tried that (sort of) after I wrote my first book, “Invasive Thoughts” I jumped right into a second, which I started to hate after 100 pages. After I wrote this little piece for TIBU “The Scariest Conspiracy Ever” and it received over 30,000 hits, I switched and started writing, “Project: Sparerib” based on that piece, which was a chore as I needed to do as much research for it as a non-fiction book and could never get a good balance of action/character/infodump. I’ll do some heavy revisions on it sometime.
After getting done with that book I enjoyed myself by writing an old school science fiction tale, “The Setting Earth” focused on a cold war 200 years in the future between Earth and the colonies that were set up throughout the Solar System. That was a fun couple of months.
Then I had a lot of ideas for stories and novels but just couldn’t get them onto paper.
After a little research I found a lot of writers go through this postpartum depression after finishing a book. So this time I planned ahead. After finishing, “The Pizza Diaries” I forced myself to take two weeks off. I went to the library and got a couple of books I had been meaning to read. “The Time-Travelers Wife” to check and see if it was anything like my tale of time traveling romance, it wasn’t. And “Time Enough for Love” not to compare it’s just one of the few Heinlein books I haven’t read.
Now that my mind has had time to idle a bit, and get the characters and tone of “The Pizza Diaries” out of the foreground I’m about to start on my fifth novel. This one is actually a Young Adult/Science Fiction novel, if 18 year olds are considered Young Adult. It features a college student, “Howie” who is having his mind stolen and the only one who can help him is “Vivian” a girl with extreme Bi-Polar disorder who has nearly lost her own mind.
This should be different enough so I don’t have to worry about mentally comparing it to my other novels, but still have a lot the weird dark tones that I’ve put into the others so if someone likes it they won’t be to disappointed if they pick up my other books.
I’m looking forward to writing again. Hopefully in three months, or less, when I finish this one I won’t need two full weeks off. Forcing myself not to write was tough.
By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts
