The Circus Won't Have Me (I Can't Juggle).

Ahem! So it's July. My last entry was in May. Glad to see I'm keeping on top of this blog thing!
The good news about the delay between posts is that I've been writing, and I've learned something.

There are writers out there who can write multiple stories at the same time, and there are those who can't. At present I firmly reside in the realm of Nope! Can't do it! I've tried and it's been an ongoing disaster that I've only recently started to dig myself out of.

Now, when I say "write" I do mean exactly that. I have no trouble writing one story and revising or outlining another. But if I try to actually write two stories at once? Catastrophe! Disaster! Calamity! Cataclysm! Armageddon! You get the picture. We're talking problems of the Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and Steve Buscemi together on a rocket ship proportions.

I've been writing an Alt History/Fantasy since October of last year. I continued working on it, albeit at a slower pace, through Pitch Madness, without a hitch. I discussed where things started to get out of hand in April. Since that time I've actually been writing fairly consistently at least 300 words a day, 5 days a week. Not a great pace, but the habit is back, and that's great.

I've had a few incredible story ideas sneak up on me, as they tend to, while I got my groove back. That's great right? Awesome story ideas that just keep coming? What's there to complain about? Well, Writer's Block has never been a worry for me. I doubt I'll ever have a shortage of ideas. I worry more about a shortage of time. If they keep coming I may never have enough time to write them all in the manner they deserve.

So, those incredible story ideas. Yeah. I couldn't wait. I dug into one pretty heavily (a sci-fi, a genre I love and have wanted to sink my teeth into), and it consumed me. I wrote a barebones outline, then dug into a few test scenes and character spots. I really love the feel and scope of it. I was really rolling with it, at least until I hit the first plot hole in the outline.

I can handle that just fine normally by digging in and getting my hands dirty in the muck. But I had another story sitting around 40K words in that I could just jump over to and work on right? Lots of writers do it! It couldn't be that hard... What's the worst that could happen?

Well. I can tell you what the worst that could happen was: I'd lost the feel of the Alt History/Fantasy and couldn't keep the headspace required for the sci-fi and a new cast of vastly different characters. I hit a hard wall and lost momentum on TWO stories.

 It was a long slow road to sort myself out. I went back to the beginning of the story and worked through what I'd written from the start. Performing a mini-revision on a third of a story isn't something I ever wanted to do (especially considering the mental anguish dwelling on my early drafts causes me), but it was exactly what I needed.

So, for the time being I'm writing exclusively on the Alt History/Fantasy and only jotting outline notes on anything else.

I know writing multiple stories at once is certainly possible, and I might be able to do it someday. I'm nowhere near there yet.

Lesson learned.

- Alex