What Next? — STEVEN HARDESTY

Moping around the house today feeling bored and pointless, getting in my wife’s way at every turn in my wanderings up and down stairs. Yesterday I finished and published on Amazon a book I’d worked on for the last 7 years (The Glass Horseman) and now I don’t know what to do with myself. Too exhausted to start another manuscript.

Before all you young whippersnappers out there jeer for my writing so slooowly, I’ll say that during those 7 years I finished and published a dozen other books. Including a seven-book series (the Harry Seaburn crime capers) I wrote in a speedy 10 months. But other novels, well, the record-keeper took me 30 years to get just right (In the Season of Poison) before I dared put it between covers.

Mark Twain needed 10 years to finish Huck Finn. By that standard, I’m both slower and faster than the greatest American writer. That’s something, isn’t it? Well, I think so.

It is not as though I’ve nothing else handy to work on. I often write two-three projects at a time, jumping from one to another as it pleases me and bringing to fruition whichever seems ready to take off on its own. The book just finished is my first stab at a weird Western (that’s The Glass Horseman). Lots of fun and lots of hard work. But I also had two other manuscripts in that horse race – a classic Western story and a Western comic mystery – and now I’ll see which of them seems likely to rocket away.

Or maybe I’ll go back to that bit of nonfiction that my writing group scorned last online meeting or revive the vampire romcom for which I’ve got a great cover or dredge up from the bottom of the drawer a sci-fi detective story or, oh well. Maybe I’ll just go paint a wall. I’m looking at a wall that needs it.