A couple of posts ago I mentioned casually that I’d spent some of my vacation time writing.

(Never marry a writer if you ever want to go on a vacation and not have your traveling partner tapping at a laptop. Lakeside or Lido deck, I get some of my best writing done on vacation.)

During my vacation, I started a new project.

I don’t want to talk about it.

I know. I brought it up. My fault. It’s just that this project is the first I’ve undertaken since I went all professional, since I went all BOOM, AGENTED WRITER. A lot of you will know this already, but once you are out there with a book, you’ve sort of decided what kind of writer you are, and your next project best look a lot like your last one. If it sells. If it doesn’t, then I guess it best not.

Is my new project like my last? I don’t know yet. I’m what’s called in the writing world [vocabulary word!] a pantser.

(Carsten, get your mind out of the gutter.)

A pantser starts a book without knowing where the thing will go. That’s how I work.

Usually. This new project is also the first time I’ve ever sat down for a few hours ahead of time and figured out a few things about a novel before starting to write it.

The pantser, de-pantsed. Sort of. I like pantsing, and I think I might be one of those writers who comes up with better stuff if I allow myself some pantsing. So let’s call what I’m doing now a hybrid. Which makes me a little hesitant, a little nervous.

Of course it’s a hybrid that has 10,000 words written already.

OK, there it is. That’s what I wanted to say, I guess. I went on vacation for two weeks, read fourteen books, and wrote 10K words. (Like I said, don’t marry a writer if you want to see the sights.)

10,000 words in less than two weeks is not too shabby. That’s the part I don’t mind talking about.

The rest of it? I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. What if I don’t like it? What if I get a few more thousand words down the pike and can’t figure out where to go? What if the bit of planning I did before I started killed the sense of adventure I get from writing and I can’t stand the thing tomorrow?

So I’m not getting too far ahead of myself. I’m working on something, and I won’t be talking about it too much. Because that’s how you pants, baby. That’s how you pants.