Mark T. Sullivan

I've written nine novels, half a dozen screenplays, twenty short stories, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, but never a blog. I'm a stickler for form, but this is a writing form that seems to have no form, from letter to shout out, from column to compendium. The point being that after reading hundreds of these things, you realize a blog can be virtually anything you want it to be. Which is cool and scary and creative and daunting.

So, what to blog about, on this, my initial foray?

How about limbo?

I'm not talking the dance. And I'm not talking the Catholic version, which I was introduced to via a disturbing illustration in my second grade catechism book -- a blue whirlpool with black human silhouettes being sucked into the void.

No, I'm talking that limbo between the time you finish a manuscript and when you hold the actual book in your hand. Prior to entering limbo, the manuscript is life consuming, six or seven hours a day, six days a week for a year or more. You spend all this time and you dream, you doodle, you draft, discover and redraft and dream again, until it feels whole to you and your editor.

You've given birth to something, but then, like some scene in Dickens, the baby disappears.

You get to see the baby now and then as it goes through copy editing, galleys and proofing. But it's no longer there every day. You're disconnected and cast into that limbo between writing and publishing, creativity and marketing.

I'm in that limbo right now with TRIPLE CROSS. It been done for almost a year. It comes out in mid-April, three months from now, and I've seen the cover, and read the blurbs other writers have graciously given me. But I've forgotten the experience of writing the novel because I'm so far into the next one, less than fifty pages to go until I have a first draft.

After nine novels, I find that that's the only way to fill the limbo between writing and publishing. I keep writing. I invent something new and it becomes entwined in my life and eventually dominates my thoughts until my editor says it's done; and I'm childless once again, spinning around in that blue whirlpool, looking at the silhouettes that have joined me in limbo, and trying to tell their stories.