The Next Big Thing

I've just been putting the finishing touches on a scholarly article and I realized that when this is done, I'll be at the end of all my current writing projects. For the first time since grad school, I don't have half a dozen undone essays and articles awaiting my attention. In the past 12 months I've published two articles and a pile of reviews, presented three conference papers, and written the article I'll send off at the end of the week. This burst of activity represents the culmination of years of research, reading, and writing, so it feels like the end of something big, but the question remains: what next? What is the Next Big Thing in my writing life? I have a few options:

1. These last two scholarly articles opened up an area of inquiry I find stimulating and challenging. I could pursue some of those ideas in greater depth in some other essays and eventually cobble them together into a book proposal.

2. What about a textbook? I've been sharing pedagogical ideas and materials with colleagues for years and it's possible that there's a market for more. I find the possibility of writing a textbook proposal rather intimidating, but others have done it so why can't I?

3. I've been fiddling with a fiction project for a few years and one of these days I'll have to finish it. So far, though, I've had no success in publishing the pieces that are complete, which suggests that this ought to be a secondary project rather than the Next Big Thing.

The resident he-man, who has always had more confidence in my writing ability than I have, keeps asking me, "Why don't you just write a best-seller?" To which I always want to respond, "Okay, and why don't you just go out and save the world?" It's not easy to know what to write when there are so many possibilities, all of them both fascinating and daunting. After I send off the current article, I suppose I ought to just sit back and breathe deeply for a few days, but then it'll be time to take the plunge. If I end up floundering around, I just hope someone on shore will toss me a rope.