I’ve been writing a lot lately, though not here.

Or, more accurately, I have been revising my novel — filling in plot holes, teasing out unnecessary words, working on phrases and sentences and paragraphs and pages and chapters until…now.

I am in unchartered waters.

I have revised and rewritten until I have caught myself up, and what lies ahead is unborn and unwritten.

It is a strange place to be, this liminal world in between the creation and the act. It is a shadowy space, where the voices in my head begin their whisperings, where I listen until one of them suggests something that sparks an idea that takes hold and forms itself into something on the page.

I have a rough outline in my head of how my novel will end, but I have listened to the whispers for long enough to know that they have minds of their own, and that they fashion what they will, when they want to. When I am quiet and still enough to let them, they tell me things I do not expect, take me places I did not know existed, and reveal truths I had not excavated.

Sometimes a single blank page appears to be infinitesimally small, adrift upon a great heaving ocean of unformed creations.

Other times words come slowly, drip by drip.

But when I allow myself to settle in that liminal space, sentences often come in streams — flowing out in descriptions and dialogue and drama — and I know I have sat long enough to be allowed the privilege of navigating that wild and watery world, hoping against hope that before too long, I will sight land.