I’m Not Ready to Return to My Creative Writing Desk Yet

Tuesday, August 18, 2026 – Orlando, Florida

Hi, everyone.

I’m still on my self-imposed break from Professional Daydreaming.™ Reluctantly, yes, but still on it.

I had hoped to start writing—or at least seriously thinking through—the fine details of the story I’ve titled And the Horse You Rode in On this week. Maybe even today. I know the Big Picture parts: when the story takes place, which characters will be in it, and the general tone I want. The seeds are already there in Reunion: Coda, after all; I’m fleshing out an event from Jim Garraty’s pre-high school years that gets mentioned in passing in my second book. So, yes, I do have some of the particulars figured out already.

What I don’t have, here in late August 2026, are the things my college creative writing instructor, Professor David Schroeder, used to call “concrete details” and “specific plot points”—the actual building blocks of a story. It’s helpful to have a functioning set of characters already waiting in the wings, protagonists and antagonists included, which is probably why I keep returning to stories centered around Jim Garraty instead of writing one self-contained standalone after another. And it’s always good to have at least some idea, however faint or slippery, of what the situation will be. At least then you have a place to begin.

Unfortunately, even with some important building blocks already in place, I still don’t feel ready to begin work on even a modestly ambitious project like a novella or novelette. The story has been tapping on my shoulder ever since I published Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen last summer. I already have two co-protagonists, an antagonist, and the faint outline of a plot suggested by an incident mentioned in an earlier work. But as of this writing, that’s all I have.

And that, folks, simply isn’t enough. Not for me.

I don’t know if I’m blocked because I’m getting older and tire far more easily than I did as recently as 2023. I don’t know if it’s the turbulence my life has gone through since I began Reunion: Coda three years ago. Maybe I’ve simply burned through too much creative energy by drafting and releasing not one, but three books—Reunion: Coda, Comings and Goings, and The Jim Garraty Chronicles—in a relatively brief period. Is it depression? Is it a reaction to what I call “reader apathy”?

I honestly don’t know. All I can say is this: I’m not ready to return to my creative writing desk. I want to be ready. I want to want it enough. But wanting to write something worth reading doesn’t mean much if I can’t sit down at that desk and take the work seriously.