This topic is a bit self-indulgent, but so is writing blog posts for a month and assuming there's an audience for it. So with that in mind:
In one of the books I'm reading now, there's a scene where a young writer is having dinner with a group of more experienced writers. She has been moping about her struggles to start a new novel, so they decide to ambush her, in a friendly way, with a writing intervention. They pool their resources and try to help her come up with a new idea to work with.
My experience as a writer has been mostly autonomous over the decades. It's probably been since college that I've had any kind of active writing community around me, which is fine; anything about this I've learned to do is because of that mostly solitary direction. I've always had a small circle of early readers, and more people have seen my manuscripts as I've slowly learned to have more faith in my capability.
Reading that scene made me wonder, though. What would it be like to have others feeding me ideas? I'm not in any idea drought myself. My dilemma is quite the opposite: I have a manuscript to revise this summer, but I'd also like to start playing with a new one. I just don't know which new idea to go after.
So I thought I'd try this: Since anyone reading this is likely to be at least semi-familiar with what I've done, what do you think I should try next? I figure this is like going to hear a band, and when they ask the crowd for requests, they might play a song similar to what gets shouted out but may not play it for a year or so. No limits or qualifications here; I have six potential projects on deck which are very different from each other. Some are for kids, some are not, some are genres I've worked in, some I've never tried. (For the record, none are about tacos.)
Any thoughts out there?
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