Burned Out

As the editing process for my sixth novel winds down, it’s safe to say that I am burned out on the writing process.  I’m not saying I’ll never write again—that would be a fallacy—but I could stand a break.  You arrive at a certain point where you’ve left everything you had on the page, played all of your cards, and your brains starts to go mushy.  It’s been an interesting thirteen months.  All I wanted to do was complete one novel, to prove to myself that I could.  That one novel turned into a four-book series, with two enjoyable unrelated novels in the interim that I’m also really proud of.  I guess when you’re trying to prove something to yourself, it’s far different than proving things to others—your focus is on internal mechanisms within your mind, hidden emotions, subconscious fears…you learn about yourself in the process.  What I learned through this process is that no matter how bad I was feeling about myself, how negative I viewed my life situation, I was able to create something happy and meaningful for my characters.  I could be at my lowest emotionally and still put something surprising on the page, something my faithful readers would enjoy.  And that was always, always the silver lining.