Hey blog readers! I’ve come back from my honeymoon feeling really creatively energized. I’ve got a bunch of stuff, in a bunch of genres, cooking at once. I’ve realized that often when I hit a stopping point in a project, it’s because there’s something I need to work out, and at that point the best thing to do is to step away and let my subconscious hammer away at it.

But then what do I do for the rest of my allotted writing time???

That’s why I’ve decided to work on multiple projects in a day. I have the projects prioritized in my mind, and I start with the one that I most want to make progress on. Then I write until I hit what I think is a stopping point, and then I’ve been moving on to a second project, and sometimes even a third project.

My second project is really interesting! It’s a YA fantasy novel I was working on in the summer of 2015. I got more than halfway through the book, but then I had some issues and started to feel like the book was really shitty. But I went back and reread it and was like No! This book is good! It contains the heart of longing!

So I picked it back up. I saw exactly why I’d stopped where I did: one of the plot strands had completely lost all momentum. But I went back and revamped it so it was thematically more attached to the rest of the narrative. And now the whole thing is humming along really well! It’s nice to be working on long-form speculative fiction. This book is an epistolary novel (very much inspired by Dangerous Liaisons, which is what I was reading that summer) about a non-magical boy who keeps trying to sweet-talk his way into a Hogwarts style wizarding school.

My tertiary projects vary. The other day I spent a bunch of time submitting stories. I’ve worked on revising some short stuff. Have tried my hand at some things I might self-publish. We’ll see! It’s nice to keep busy, though.