going quiet

The old pattern was back the other morning. I woke at 5 and sat down at my table, waiting for the sun to rise. Here it comes, zooming fast above Dartmoor and much more blinding than the vast round ball of red that bulged over Plymouth Citadel a few months back. I opened my manuscript book, pen in hand, and prepared to write.
Then found I didn't want to. Keen observers of this blog might have spotted an equivalent silence of late.
Two new novels of mine, one for adults and one for children, were being passed around the London Book Fair this week. That suddenly seemed enough to be going on with. Even my doodles feel artless just now. There comes a time when you're just spent.
I'll fill in forms, write modules and handbooks for next year's teaching, read and re-read what I'll be teaching then. I recently found and liked Nabokov's notion that there is no such thing as reading, only re-reading, the only way to find true worth in a book. I think he is right but without my teaching responsibilities I wouldn't have found this out for myself ... another example of learning to slow down rather than rush forward to the new all the time.
So some reading is due ... but I can't say I need recharging by other people's words just now to trigger me into more of my own. Some light-touched landscape and silence will do me for a while.