Every writer, we can presume, has plans for the next work – or several. Tackling them, of course, can be another matter altogether, especially if the schedule’s already full, even before we get to the overdue house and garden projects. Or some equivalent.

Listen to other writers, by the way, and you’ll hear just how much of that schedule now focuses on marketing, including social media, to push already published work instead of doing the, well, not exactly “fun” part (it is, after all, work) but the passionate core that prompts the entire enterprise: drafting and revising. The very thing that makes us writers.

For me, much of that has also involved moving four decades of serious writing, however experimental, into the public access where adventurous readers might find the volumes. Places like Smashwords.com and my Thistle/Flinch site here at WordPress. To be candid, the backlog was inhibiting my ability to forge ahead on new work – not exactly writer’s bloc, but something more like claustrophobia? Having the remaining novels in the pipeline for ebook publication is a huge relief.

Let me repeat, though, about the necessity of marketing and how that should be the focus.

What’s taken root over the past several months, though, is another novel. One that just might pull my Hippie Trails series together a half-century later. That is, something that covers far more than just ’60s and ’70s. Am I crazy?

Well, maybe. What’s shaping up is far different from anything I’ve previously undertaken.

For one thing, I’m starting with an overarching structure – something approaching an outline, rather than my usual setting forth on a journey to see where an image or character or idea will lead. And then there’s little autobiographical here; it’s largely new territory, apart from tying up some loose ends from the earlier novels. The dictum, “Write about what you know,” gets readjusted to “Write about what you would like to know,” meaning more about certain ethnic groups I’ve encountered, businesses I’ve brushed up against, spiritual practices, histories, desires, losses. I’m even beginning with a commercial genre in mind, which means drafting from a perspective and in a voice far from my own.

I’m not sure this is a work I’ll actually finish. It may be too difficult. Or it may become more of a collaboration, perhaps with a circle of beta readers set at liberty to edit at will. (Have I ever written of my theory that what we know as Shakespeare was the product of a circle of very talented improvisers, whose inventions were recorded by the playwright? Almost a committee, if you will, except for his imprint on the final version.)

Different from anything else I’ve done to date? How about needing to finish a draft of the last chapter, along with a stretch of the opening, before writing anything else? Or heading off with 80 or so pages of notes for the middle, plus questions to pursue? It’s certainly driven by the characters and events that turn in directions I’d normally avoid.

What I do know from experience is how crucial it is to sit down at the keyboard when these juices are flowing.