Interim Step Eight: What To Do While You're Waiting

Circling Back To The Beginning—Concept Building

I always forget how much waiting there is in publishing. I’m in one of those odd fallow moments right now, as you can probably tell by the multiple “Interim Step” posts. Part of that is my own doing—the proposed schedule for my copyedits landed on the day I’m leaving for the holidays, so my amazing, incredible (I am madly in love with you for not making me work over Christmas) team pushed off to January 1. Hence, there has been a gap in the 22 Steps process.

This is actually perfect because this allows me to address a few things, like planning and the deep life, wrapping up the Jayne series, and otherwise doing some dreaming. But since this happens regularly in the project process as well as in the creative life in general, I thought it was a good idea to talk about what to do when there’s nothing to do. What to do while you’re waiting to get feedback. What to do while you’re out on submission, looking for an agent, or even just waiting out the lag time between editorial and production to the epic timeframe that is the end of production to release.

Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Unsplash