Blank page, blank mind

So you may have noticed (or not, depending on how much my blog interests you) that I've been away for a little while.

I finished the very first draft of my novel in August and, as much as I wanted to dive straight back in again, I've been forcing myself to take a step back. It's been pretty much a month to the day that I finished that draft and during that time, I've barely done anything writerly at all - including blogging.

I just wanted to take a complete break from everything - my novel, my blog, authonomy - and at first it felt fantastic. Reading all day, baking, bingeing on TV shows online, playing the sims (not to mention going back to my day job) - ahh, that was the life for me. But over the past few weeks...I just haven't been feeling it. I've been picking up books, reading a page then dropping them again. I've been firing up the sims, only to stare blankly at the screen, wondering what the hell I'm doing. I've been feeling...restless.

As soon as I finished Synthetica, I wanted to begin work on the sequel while it was all fresh in my mind. However, in the end I forced myself not to, and I tried to work on a completely new idea instead. But as soon as I wrote down my initial thoughts, I panicked, managed to convince myself that I'm not a writer and that I shouldn't even attempt to try and write anything new (that would've made a great depressing IWSG post).

It was only this weekend that I finally snapped.

I am not good at doing nothing (reading doesn't count as nothing btw). I'm happiest when I'm busy. And so, on Sunday I began to write down an outline for my new novel, telling myself that I could do all this (i.e. planning/writing a novel from scratch) again. And to my surprise, it didn't go quite as badly as I thought it would. Scenes began to pop in my brain as I idly wrote about possible settings, new characters forced their way out of the woodwork, and by Sunday night...I couldn't wait to get started properly.

Ideally, I'd like to get the detailed synopsis done for this new WIP before I start the edits on Synthetica but as I was going to start working on Synthetica this week, somehow I don't think that's going to happen. So we'll see how it goes. But most of all, I'm simply going to remember to not stress out and just have fun with whatever it is I'm writing :).

Happy Tuesday, everyone!