A Third Book

Well, my second novel, The Rules of Love & Grammar, just came out this Monday in Germany (there it's called Der Sommer der Sternschnuppen or The Summer of Shooting Stars) and I'm VERY excited to report that by Wednesday it was number 25 on their paperback bestseller list. I almost fainted when I got that news. On May 31 the book will be published in the U.S. and I'm looking forward to that.

But the book has been out of my hands for weeks now, while my publishers in the U.S. and Germany have been doing what they do to get it ready to send it out into the world. It's kind of like going through an "empty nest" syndrome, similar to how people feel when their kids go off to college. So I've been thinking about my third novel.

Writers, like many others, can't rest on their laurels or on their last project. They have to move ahead to the next thing and that's what I want to do. When I'm not writing, it feels as though there's a piece missing from my life. And I also feel kind of guilty that I haven't already written some pages for a new book. I've tinkered with a couple of different ideas, and done a handful or so of some very rough pages, but that's about it. Nothing was working.

The good news, however, is that I think I've landed on an idea that will work. It's an idea that I keep coming back to, so that tells me I've got to do it. I was explaining it to my editor yesterday, on the phone, and I described the beginning and the ending of the book, and then I added, "Oh, and there are about three hundred fifty pages in between that I still have to figure out." I laughed. She liked the idea. I think I'm on to my next novel.