If we’re connected on social media beyond the confines of this blog, you may have noticed I’m kind of quiet lately. I’ve taken the past two weeks off Facebook and plan to take one more. It was mostly because I found myself mindlessly scrolling through the same old stuff, not getting much joy out of it, and wasting my time. Plus, what better time to take a break than during the weeks leading up to and the week of a contentious election?

What have I been doing with that extra time? Hiking, of course, plus cleaning my office, doing yardwork, recovering from the fall crud, watching movies with my boys, and doing the groundwork needed to revamp a story line in a novel manuscript I had long since considered done.

That’s right. Instead of using National Novel Writing Month to work on my newest manuscript, which is what I had been planning, I’m taking two huge steps back to rework part of the story on The Bone Garden. I’ve mapped it all out. Now all that remains is the execution. Some characters will be combined, some will be altered, some will disappear, one will be brought out from obscurity and into an important role. It will be a big, complicated job, but I can already tell it will make that story line so much stronger and more compelling. And all the answers to my problems were right there in the text itself, waiting for me to discover them.

I wrote the first words of this book nearly three years ago, and I started the research for it four years ago. If I’m lucky and it gets contracted next year, it might be out by the end of 2018, nearly six years since I started the work on it. With the exception of my garden, I’ve never tinkered with anything this long, certainly not any creative endeavor. I’m more of a “get an idea and execute it within a month (sometimes within hours)” kind of person. But a novel, especially one as layered and complex and interwoven as this one, with its three time periods and three protagonists whose lives intermingle in many ways, is a behemoth of a project.

I’ll be popping back onto Facebook in not too long, but most of my screen time (beyond my “real job”) is going to be spent in my story. Hopefully by the end of this year I’ll have it all tied up in a bow and ready to send back to my agent so I can get back to what I had originally wanted to work on as we headed into winter.

I’m trying to be content with the timeline I’m on, to live and work in this moment rather than always anticipating the one ahead. So as I get out from under this fall sickness and I can get myself up in the early morning darkness to work on my story, I’ll try to remember how thankful I am each morning to get to work on something I love.

I’m sure the coffee will help.