Somewhere along the way, the number of books I’m ‘working on’ crept past thirty and kept climbing. Thirty-seven, give or take, depending on how you count the ones still a little more than a few thousand words and a strong feeling. People ask, not unreasonably, how on earth one person keeps track of all of that. The honest answer is: not always very well.

My System (Such As It Is)

I’d love to tell you there’s a sophisticated tracking system behind all this: a spreadsheet, a wall of index cards, something suitably writerly. There isn’t. Mostly, I keep track by feel. A project sits quietly in the back of my mind until it doesn’t any more, and I know it’s time to go back to it. This is not a method I’d recommend to anyone who values certainty, but it’s the only one that’s ever worked for me.

In fact, the only time I find myself concentrating on a single project is when Annalisa and Brendan are pushing me. Fortunately, that manuscript is now in the hands of three different publishers, and I am waiting to hear back. This allows me to go back to my usual chaotic ways.

I suppose it’s fortunate in a way that 23 of those 37 books all exist within the narrative universe of Paranormal City. That means that I have a bit of an overview of what I’m doing because characters often appear in more than one story and even more than one book as cameos. Or a cameo character may suddenly develop into a major character in a different book. This interconnectedness has advantages and disadvantages, of course. On the one hand, I don’t have quite as many characters. On the other hand, I have to make sure I keep them consistent; I can’t give them a superpower in one story and deny that they have it in another. 

The only system I use is to keep all manuscripts in Dropbox and access them using Scrivener, an app specifically created by writers for writers. I can thoroughly recommend it if you’re intending to be a serious writer yourself; you can try it for free to see if it’s for you [unsolicited plug]. If anyone is interested, please let me know, and I will write a blog post about using it.

How the Muse Chooses

I don’t decide which of the 37 books gets my attention on a given day, nor which of the 235+ still-unfinished short stories that comprise some of them. Not really. The Muse does, and her reasoning is opaque even to me. Some mornings, it’s obviously the Shuttlers sequel demanding attention, or Paranormal City needs a new street. On other days, a project I haven’t touched in three months suddenly insists it’s been patient long enough and wants to be finished right now, thank you very much.

Then there are the days when several projects are all vying for my attention.

For instance, a couple of days ago, I was glancing through some of my unfinished short stories, preparing for a writing sprint the next day. I came across one about a human who feels he is being stalked by an alien that I had started in May 2023. I had been trying and trying to turn it into a science-fiction alien horror story. I got nowhere.

Then, late in the evening, just before 2 am, actually, my Muse struck! I suddenly thought, “Why not make this a science fiction alien romance?” At that point, the floodgates opened.

Since I am trying to develop the habit of going to bed earlier (i.e., not at 4 am as usual), I scribbled down about 400 words of notes at the end of the story. This apparently was enough to satisfy my Muse for the moment, and I was able to go to bed. However, it didn’t stop her putting new ideas into my head as I lay waiting to fall asleep, which I promptly wrote down as soon as I got up the following morning, adding another 150 words to the précis.

At the sprint that evening, I converted the first 134 words of notes into 1,464 words of story, all in less than ¾ of an hour. It is definitely heading in the direction of a romance, but my Muse loves mixing things up. So far in the story, I have had a double lynching and a possible kidnapping, too.

The Risk of Losing Threads

With this many books on the go, I won’t pretend that nothing ever gets dropped or muddled. I’ve occasionally gone back to something after a long gap and had to properly reread my own work to remember exactly where a character’s loyalties lay, what they had been doing, and what kind of mess I’d left them in. This is precisely the kind of inconsistency that Annalisa and the editing process exist to catch, and I’m grateful, regularly, that they do.

What I Do Have

One thing I have done is to create a spreadsheet. It started out simply as a means to monitor the number of words in each book. However, over time, I wanted to know how much I’d written on a particular day. Once I had that in place, I decided I needed to keep an eye on each book separately. Then I got annoyed at having to add up and transfer the numbers from the ‘Individual Days’ sheet to the ‘Word Counts’ sheet, so I automated it. Then I wanted a statistical overview of how I’ve been doing every year…

And so it goes. Please remember that I was a software engineer for over 30 years.

Why I Don’t Narrow It Down

People sometimes suggest I’d be more productive by focusing on one or two books at a time. They’re probably right, in a narrow, sensible sense. But the Muse doesn’t operate on sensible principles. Her interests and creativity span too wide a panorama, and I’ve learned that fighting her preferred chaos costs me more momentum than it saves. Thirty-seven books, one brain, no apparent plan or way to streamline either.

I wouldn’t have it any other way, even on the days it makes my head spin slightly just thinking about it.