QUIET: WORKING.

The most surprising thing has happened the past couple of weeks. I finished my novel, sent it off to my editor and my agent, did my happy dance. Then I sat back down at the computer. Now that I had a little bit of downtime, I planned to blog at least twice a week. Write articles. Work on a short story I’ve had simmering on the back burner for months. I was raring to go. But it was as if someone had turned a tap off in my head. All the words that, these past many months, had come pouring out of my fingertips into the keyboard onto paper just…vanished.

No. Vanished isn’t the right word. They’re not gone. It feels, instead, as though they’ve gone deep. As if my brain is earth. Waiting. Warming in the spring sun, recharging. Gathering energy.

In the meantime, I’ve been out to see my friends. Lots of laughing, lots of catching up. Working my day job, of course. Cleaning my house. All the while, soaking up everything around: the smell of flowers that hits as soon as I step outside my front door (Oregon in the spring is not only beautiful, but beautifully fragrant), the way a person in the coffee shop crinkles her eyes when she smiles. Everything. Instead of churning out, my brain is taking in. Watching and observing and listening and turning things over. I can feel it, just below the surface. Thoughts and fragments of ideas float up, sink again.

It sounds odd, probably. It’s as if the subconscious puts up a sign: QUIET. WORKING. I think about writing, I sit at the computer. I type. I don’t say much.

But the past day or two, I’ve become irritable. A sure sign—I’ve learned—of words building up. Wanting to break loose.

A little rest, a fallow time. And now we begin again.