Waiting in Darkness

In a week or so I will be done with the editing process for the fourth book: The Last Summer of the Death Warriors. That book is slated to come out March 2010. Sometime later in 2010 (my wonderful editor Cheryl Klein is also very flexible and kind) I need to deliver a rough draft of the fifth book. What I want to talk about here is what it feels like to not know at this moment what that book will be about. I should be looking for something to write about. I should be calculating. Instead I am waiting. I am waiting in what feels like a kind of darkness. A couple of weeks ago something happened that made me think that I was indeed waiting and not just avoiding the matter. I was walking and a glimmer of an idea came to me. It just came. I treasure this idea and protect it with my silence although I am also full of doubts about it. It may be just a passing fancy. It could be that the idea points towards a challenge I don’t feel I can meet. So I wait some more. Maybe another idea will come. Or maybe this humble and lonely idea will stay and grow. Maybe with time I will believe that I am strong enough to meet the challenge it presents. I don’t know how much longer to wait before just diving in. I wish I could sit down one day and write an outline of a book. Here are the characters and here is what happens. I wish I could calculate more. Instead I am cursed with a sense that it is okay to wait a little longer. It is not easy to wait in this darkness. It is scary. It is scary because we don’t know what will come or when. It is scary because there’s a little voice that asks “what if you are just being lazy?” I think here of how much faith and waiting have in common (“For the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting” says T.S.Eliot in the Four Quartets). Waiting begets faith and faith begets waiting. What makes the waiting worthwhile, what fills the waiting with faith is the expectation or certainty that something will come. At the right time I will know what to write. The voice of the young person I want to write about will come (the voice always comes first) and the story will follow.