Wrapping Up
Yesterday, I wrapped up the revisions on Generous Thinking, and I’m finding myself of very mixed minds about where I am today. On the one hand, I am super excited about getting the manuscript into the press’s hands, getting it moving through the process toward the next stage of its public life. The events of the last few weeks — at both the national and the institutional level — have me convinced that this project needs to be out there now.
On the other hand, I have the not-so-vague feeling that I have been running as hard as I can toward the edge of a cliff, and that one morning soon, having sent off the manuscript, I’ll look down and discover there’s nothing beneath my feet. So I’m finding myself drawn to doing bit of preemptive thinking about what’s next, hoping that the gap between the ground I’m currently running on and the next bit of ground ahead might be less wide and less deep, leading to a less painful crash.
Don’t get me wrong, I know a fair bit of what’s ahead: reviewing copyedits, indexing, and all the other many things that still have to be done on my side of the process of transforming that manuscript into a finished book. But I have never completed a major project knowing what my next project was going to be. Or — maybe this is closer to the truth — I have concluded major projects thinking I knew what the next project was going to be, but I have always, always been wrong. And it’s taken longer than I expected, every time, to find my way into another project.
So on the one hand, I know that I’m in for a bit of flailing. On the other, I’m trying to give myself as much of a path forward as I can, so that maybe I can avoid the worst of it. This time out, that path consists of a lot of reading, piles of books that I’ve stacked up over the last few months, that I’ve been looking forward to getting into. I think the key challenge is going to be letting myself explore, letting myself not-know exactly what it is I’m reading for. And probably letting myself do a bit more thinking-out-loud here.
In any case: manuscript out. And more, of some as-yet undetermined sort, to come.
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