I'm at that funny stage of my new novel, Thief of Souls. Since I'm only five pages into what I hope will be at least a 500-page novel, I'm only just beginning, and I'm writing down ideas, just as they come to me, which will end up shaping the course of the whole novel. I'm incredibly excited, because it's all so cool! And I'm incredibly terrified, because it all feels so cool to me--but what if I'm wrong? Or, worse yet--what if it could be cool, but in these first few pages of working out the concepts, I completely screw them up???? These are the kinds of worries that can drive a writer mad. I have the same worries every time I start a short story, of course, but short stories are so much less of an investment. In fact, even working on different kinds of novels feels less terrifying to me. When I'm writing an adult historical fantasy novel, I'm trying to create the single kind of book I love most in the world, which makes me jittery with elation and fear.

At least I've learned some things over the past few years. This morning, as I nibbled on my pen and let my imagination flow as casually as possible over what might happen in the scene and in the book, an idea flashed through my mind with huge force and power. It was a really, really gross idea, and it seriously freaked me out. I immediately thought: No! I can't do that! So of course I did. Because what I've learned is that my best and strongest ideas always feel dangerous, unnerving and much-too-revealing to me (I can't let other people know I imagine things like that! What would they think of me?), and anyway (as Patrick pointed out this morning), to be perfectly honest, I have a terribly low gross-out threshold. What grosses me out will probably not faze most other people. And those are always the scenes and plot twists that other people seem to like best in my writing.

So writing feels both heady and deeply unnerving to me right now, like surfing at the very peak of a tall wave that could come crashing down at any moment. I know that within a month or so, once the ideas have settled safely into place in my head, I'll hit the stage where the writing flows much more easily and I'm also much less excited about it--it then feels more like a normal, day-to-day activity, which can be boring or interesting depending on very mild variations in my mood. But for now, I'm enjoying the dangerous, exhilerating feeling of wave-riding.