I turned in a round of edits to my agent last week. “Ha!” I thought. “Now I get to take a break.” The euphoria lasted about two hours. Okay, ten if you count the hours I was asleep. By the next morning, I was already in the in-between place.

Experience, patient teacher that she is, has proven to me time and again that I write better books when I give myself a break between manuscripts. My creativity gets stored in something like a rain barrel. I keep it in the back forty, and if I get greedy and draw from it too much without enough raining times in between to fill it up again, it will go dry. I know this. And yet…I still don’t like the in-between times. I get itchy and out of sorts.

My subconscious is working on something new. It always does. That’s what the in-betweens are for, but it hasn’t told me what it is yet. And so I’m just waiting and looking at the sky, watching for the clouds to gather.

If only I could keep my hands busy with something else. Maybe I should take up knitting.