What do I do when I finish a novel (as I just have)?
1. Clean my office.
2. Do all the chores that have piled up as I wrote my last few chapters (during that last dash to the finish line, I am aware of very little else around me!).
3. Conduct a final polishing of my draft from start to finish and again (and again).
4. Take a small vacation. (Just returned from six days of hiking in the deserts of California, seeing cacti blooming and lizards sunning.)
5. Allow the seed of my next young-adult adventure novel to spring from my brain to fertile soil (which it does with astonishing swiftness and eagerness and ambition).
6. Start researching and outlining my next novel!
