What to Write About

What do you write about when you have nothing to write? I don’t have writer’s block. I simply have no book to write for the first time in 20 years. I have three books in the can so that’s saying something, I suppose. There was such urgency with the Western, the X-Mas tales, the dog book and collection of ghost-written short stories, but now, nothing is urgent because there is no project.

It feels strange, off, vertiginous. I do have an idea for an ecological-themed mystery/detective novel called The Watershed, but it requires considerable on-the-ground research across the region and obviously that’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever. So here I am writing about not writing.

It occurs to me as I write this that I could start assembling all my writing about driftwood forts and choosing the best photographs for a possible newsprint publication. But that’s not writing a book. The driftwood fort book is already written.

Perhaps an idea will come as the result of misfortune such as the one that inspired Love & The Green Lady, or how a brutal breakup inspired Of Walking in Rain, or how a pulverizing catastrophe inspired Bonnie and Clyde.

Perhaps I am not seeing opportunity in the Pandemic and the disaster of the Trump Residency and the fires and the ongoing call for racial justice.

I don’t know.