I’m still not entirely sure how I pulled it off, but I pulled it off. I managed to write In My Blue World (and start in on its revision) while writing the Apartment Complex story at the same time. Each book hovers around 75k words, give or take a few thousand, and each book in its first draft completed form took around six or seven months.
If you’d asked me about ten years ago if I could write two full novels in a year that quickly, I probably would have answered ‘only in my dreams’.
So how did I do it, anyway? Well, the short and boring version is this: two daily sessions at 750Words (one during Day Job breaks and the other in the evening), five days a week. Simple as that. [This is not a paid commercial for that site, by the way — I just happen to love using it for my projects.]
Going into more detail, I’d say that it was a bit of a trick. First of all, I had to make sure I had the drive and the willingness (and the time!) to dedicate to it, and that is a lot harder to achieve in reality. I had to set up a concrete plan — the 2-entry/5-day I just mentioned — and I had to make sure I followed through. Granted, working from home did help matters considerably, as I had immediate access to the site during my morning and afternoon breaks. So did providing myself a concrete schedule that never wavered: the morning break at 9:30am and the afternoon break at 2:30pm, plus the evening writing sessions that start roughly around 7pm. It’s the same reason I managed to write The Persistence of Memories so quickly.
Secondly, I had to ensure that I dedicated the same amount of energy and time to each project, and make sure they stayed separate. In My Blue World was written during the evening, and the Apartment Complex story was written during the day. This worked out well, as my mind was on one story during the afternoon, and I could momentarily forget about it and focus on the other one in the evening. It helped that the two stories are not related in any way so there was no potential confusion!
And third, I treated every session as a way to write a complete and self-contained scene, or alternately, a segment of a much larger scene I’d already planned out that would take a few sessions to write. I’d always think these out ahead of time, maybe one or two scenes ahead, so I knew which direction I should be headed. (Knowing what to write and how to start it was another issue altogether, of course, but once I got into the groove it worked out!) I didn’t worry too much about the scene feeling too short, or incomplete; all I needed to do is just get the basics down, and the rest I can fix in revision.
I hadn’t planned on writing both novels at the same time, but I had invested in both of them to some degree and didn’t want them to stagnate without ever being worked on. As long as I kept both projects separate and consistent, I thought I could at least give it the old college try. The fact that I actually did it still surprises me, to be honest!
Writing multiple projects in tandem does require a lot of patience and dedication, so I’m sure it’s not for everyone. But it can be done. A lot of writers do in fact work on multiple projects that are at various points of completion. It’s good business sense to have something new going while your recently completed project is doing the submission rounds. (There’s also the fact that some writers may also be working on some short-term freelance work as well. There’s good grocery money in that.) Now that I know I can do it, I’m more inclined to believe that I could make a habit out of it.
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