I am not the mistress of plate spinning, apparently. Dragons I can wrangle, but only one or two at a time.
There are writers I know and love to hate (or hate to love?) who seem to effortlessly manage working on two or three projects simultaneously, probably while also saving the world from nuclear disaster and alien attacks. I multitask reasonably well in other areas of my life, but I’ve always been monogamous in my writing relationships. Recently, however, I’ve had cause to give project polygamy a try.
How hard could it really be? I asked myself. (Yes, I really am this stupid)
I figured I’d work on new words for the Secret Project in the morning, and edits for The Nothing at night. Easy peasy, fine and dandy.
Ha. Not so much. My brain simply doesn’t have enough wattage to carry around two story lines simultaneously. Instead of getting more done on two tight timelines, I got overwhelmed, depressed, and did less.
I have reverted to my original plan of working on one book at a time. But I’m curious. Those of you who can juggle more than one book at a time – what’s your secret? How do you do this?
People like me really need to know.
And that’s it – because I’m still hunting down Deadline Number One so that I can get to the other project.
My primary secret is a short attention span. I have to constantly be doing several things at once–chaos is my natural state where I am the most comfortable.
The secondary secret is just that projects–and specially the parts of my brain working on them–must be vastly different. By that i mean I can be working on a for-pay writing project (which is very structured and not at all organic) for most of the day, and then switch to writing a pleasure project (or even a trunk novel) later. Or I can work on edits/revisions, and then a chunk of new words later. For me, it would be like running for an hour, and then switching to yoga. Both are physical acts but they’re different enough that I can bounce between them.
(Except not really because fuck physical activity.)