The past couple of weeks I have felt strange.Not sure what it was. It was as if my mind was muffled. I had been writing (or trying to write) 1,000 words a day on a new novel and had reached 7,500 or so when the creative energy just petered out. I wasn't sick or anything like that; I was active in the garden swinging saws and shovels and pruning shears. And it wasn't writer's block; I had plenty of ideas (I always do, really). No, it was numbness, as if my mind or body or both was asking me, "What's the point?" Unemployed, likely unemployable in the eyes of those I send my CV to (too old, job history too erratic), unpublished, maybe unpublishable (agents don't respond any more to my queries).

And then I get a book contract out of the blue. How it happened was accidental, at least initially. I got a contact suggestion on linkedin.com for a guy with Greystone Publishing. I had worked (indirectly) for Greystone, a Vancouver outfit, earlier this year on a translation project (I done the work for a friend who had the contract) and felt I should get my name in to them for more editing projects. Start the ball rolling, if you will. The next day the guy sends me a message saying he'd like to read the manuscript of my novel, Wall of Dust, which I described on my linkedin profile. I sent it to him, dampering my expectations as much as possible, though I allowed my self to be very pleased and flattered. But I do go to Greystone's website to look him up on Greystone's website. His name's not there. I search his name and find him readily enough. The confusion is solved: the Vancouver company is Greystone Books; his company is Greystone Publishing. No problem, since the Vancouver company is more interested in Canadiana non-fiction anyway--not likely to be interested in a novel about Palestine. Two says later I get another message saying he wants to publish the book. He sends me a contract, there's a little back and forth, and by the end of the week I have signed. But I'm still numb. No excitement exhilaration, acceptance, happiness on a rather subdued level, and no spark to start writing, though I want to. I began to worry about the task I had just committed to: going over my manuscript again and again, fixing its defects, making it publishable. Again, I wanted to get going, but I couldn't drum up the excitement, the intensity I knew I would need. I began to worry I wouldn't be able to do what I knew needed to be done, not get the book out that I knew I had in me.

This lasted over the weekend until today. Not sure what it was. For a few hours I started thing: Lyme disease, thanks to a New Yorker article (deer ticks are everywhere here), but I've calmed down. Did I hit bottom and not know it? Was I digging myself a pit into a quagmire of ennui until the contract dredged me up? Would I ever have come out of it otherwise? I don't know.