My wife likes to tease me about my Palm Pilot, but I gotta tell you, I wouldn't be able to survive without it. Not only do I have my appointments and lists of birthdays (happy b-day Holly! And Clarke, and Josh, and Cammie, and Angela, and all you other folks who thought August would be a great time to be born!) and all-important To-Dos in there, along with phone numbers and addresses and a couple electronic books and stories from Fictionwise, but I also keep my lists in there.

Right now I have nine lists.

This group of lists includes novel submissions/queries (21 of 'em), story submissions (a paltry 8 right now), a list of novels I've read so far this year (I know, I know), a list of people I plan on including on my Acknowledgements Page for the 5 books I've written, once they're published (hey, you got to keep up with these things!), my goals for the year (lose HOW MANY pounds? by when???), and miscellaneous things to do before the Drew-meister is born.

The remaining two lists are my favorites -- the Novel Ideas list and the Story Ideas list.

Right now I've got about 8-9 ideas for novels (including potential sequels if one or more of my novels sell, just in case) and just three lonely ideas for stories. I have absolutely no idea at all what I want to write about, right now.

And I'm cool with that. What I've been doing, something I've been neglecting for months, is READING. I just finished my buddy Leslie's kick-ass dark fantasy novel for the workshop, and I'll be diving into the SF novel of another writer for the workshop tonight. I also started reading Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, and I keep finding more stories to read in the latest Year's Best Fantasy and Horror antho.

I suddenly can't get enough words. It's an almost intoxicating feeling. I've always been a plodding reader, and that's gotten worse the more serious I've gotten with writing. I stopped enjoying reading and regarded it as work, as research for my own writing. I'd always be studying how a writer set a scene, or how the writer described something or foreshadowed a plot twist, or even how the writer used a metaphor. I was deconstructing, not enjoying.

Now I'm at that giddy point where I'm back to enjoying the words I'm reading. And I don't feel compelled to write a new story right now, or start work on a new novel or begin revising the baseball novel. (I am, however, quite enjoying the work Tim and Greg are doing on our three-way collaboration, which is going to rock like like Richter when it's all done!) I feel like my next story could go ANYWHERE, and that's a cool feeling.

I'm going to let that feeling grow for a while before I give in to the urge to create. We'll see how long I last... Later!