When you’ve finished your novel, polished it to the best of your ability with the help of your writing group and beta readers, and started researching agents (or querying agents, or your agent is trying to sell it, or you’re waiting for the gears of publishing to churn), what do you do with yourself? The standard advice—and it’s sound—is to start working on something else.
Since my own manuscript has now entered that desk-to-(hopefully)-bookshelf pipeline, what’s next for me? I will definitely be working on something else. The trick, of course, is to figure out what my brain is willing to tackle.
I do have an idea for a sequel to the book I’ve just finished—it is, in fact, closer to the book I first started to write before realizing I needed to start my story somewhere else—but I don’t think I’m quite at the stage where I’m ready to dive into another novel. So what about short stories?
Short stories are hard for me. I’m not practiced at them, and don’t read nearly so many of them as I do novels, so their structure, the timing of the beats and so on, doesn’t come to me as naturally. And while I have a gazillion story seeds cluttering my mind, it’s hard for me at this stage to pull a plot out of the kind of turn of phrase or generalized situation those usually are.
All the more reason for me to work on short stories!
Right now I have two shorts and a flash ready (or mostly ready) to submit. One of the shorts and the flash have been out and back a few times already, but further revision is never off the table. And with writing time to spare, now, I can afford to sit down with some of the other ideas and really see what comes of them.
It’s kind of exciting to have new projects on the horizon without a novel-sized one lurking in the background. I’m hoping that by the end of the year I will both have several stories I’m proud of ready to submit to various markets and to have made my first sale. With a shift in writing focus, who knows what new magic will emerge.
So I’m taking a couple of days to appreciate the end of my kids’ school year and get my bearings—maybe even spend some real time concentrating on the latest language I’ve been learning casually on Duolingo—before leaping back into the creative stream. I can’t wait to see where it takes me!