Restless as hell. Don’t want to watch anymore TV, movies, even the great book I’m reading is just irritating. If we have anymore sex we’re both going to have rubby spots. Somewhere around day three after I finish a book, I get so restless I’m almost angry. It just seems to be part of my process of post-book down time. It doesn’t matter where I go, I’ve tried the ocean, heck I’ve gone to Disney World, and still this awful restlessness takes possession of me.
The day I wrote, The End, on the newest Merry Gentry novel, A Shiver of Light, I was on such a writer’s high, it was awesome! When the high left, the tiredness hit like it always does. First full day of not writing the book, was a day of my mood going up, and down – up and down. This mood swing is also just part of the post-book process for me. I know it and I don’t let the sad rain all over everyone. I know what is happening and I just ask my husband, Jon, “Happy, sad, happy, sad; do I always do this?”
Jon says, “Yes.”
The only thing I didn’t do per usual was I didn’t have a whole day of what I call, “The little lost lamb day,” where I wander around the house, or wherever drifting from room to room, or yard, as if I don’t know where I’m going, or what I’m doing, which is pretty accurate. Months, or a year, or more, of concentrating on this one project and suddenly it’s gone. The structure to my day, the thing that consumed me for so long and it’s done, and I’m at loose ends. I think the reason that I didn’t have as much of the “lost lamb” day is that this book was so emotionally draining I was happy to be done, and happy to begin to rest up before edits come back from New York.
Now, I’m tired, but don’t want to sleep, as I said at the beginning I don’t want to do any of the things I was looking forward to catching up on, or I’ve done them for three days and enough is enough.
I’ve tried leaving as soon as I finish a book and going some place warm with an ocean view, but I still go through the same post-book process. I’m just restless and angry staring off at amazing Caribbean blue water and palm trees, instead of St. Louis in the winter. It usually just pisses me off that I’m someplace great and still can’t be happy. But I’ve finally embraced the truth, that all this emotional angst is part of me coming down from writing a novel. I wish I was one of those writers that doesn’t go through all this, but a writer doesn’t choose their creative process, anymore than they choose what ideas come to them. J. K. Rowling says in the Harry Potter books, “The wand chooses the wizard.” Well, the idea chooses the writer.
I think the same is true of how our entire creative process works, from how we gather ourselves to write a novel, to the writing of it, and the celebrating and grieving process after it’s written. Some of us struggle to get enough ideas to write, others of us have more ideas than any one lifetime can allow us to write. Some need silence and solitude to work, others need a busy cafe around them, and still others do solitude with music blasting; we are all as different as our stories.
Now, I’m going to take this restless, cranky mood and get on the treadmill, because until I work some of this energy out I won’t sleep. I almost went to gym today, but was afraid I wouldn’t concentrate well enough for weights. Next time I’ll listen to myself and do gym sooner, but for right now treadmill. Gotta walk some of this off.