Flat spot

I'm in that depressingly flat place between books at the moment. It doesn't usually hit me quite this hard, but rushing to finish BETWEEN NOW AND THEN was such a massive effort and required so much adrenalin - coming so soon after Christmas and a major DIY effort on the house, and then a week's supposed 'break' (through which I worked continually) which also had a major surprise wrapped up in it - that anything else by comparison is bound to feel a bit second-best.

I'm also in the position of juggling two potential plots, both fairly well-developed. One of them concerns two schoolteachers from different ethnic backgrounds who meet in the cultural melting-pot of London in the mid-1960s. The other is about three generations of a family reconciling themselves with their own sexuality - and one another's. The latter is likely to be a longer book, though, and Heaven knows longer books don't exactly seem very popular at the moment. Besides, knowing the rate at which I work, a book the length of STAGE WHISPERS or MAKE DO AND MEND could take me up to a year to write, and that's really not what's needed at the moment. I need to tackle something that isn't going to take more than six months, so effectively that leaves me with the London book - and eventually with writing/having written four historical subjects in a row. Most of the other ideas in my projects folder seem to be historical too, though - there's another World War II piece, and something about the Railways Inspectorate, and a possible mediaeval piece, and something set in 1837 that doesn't take place in Paris or feature revolutionary students.

Well, it's going to be a question of thinking about this quietly over the next few days, and hopefully coming to some sort of decision by the end of the month. I find that if I just do something else and let my subconscious make the decisions I'm usually satisfied with the results, but there does seem to be quite a lot of waiting and displacement activity involved - and that, in my opinion, is almost more stressful than working flat out!