Juggling From One to Another

More Than One Book At a Time

I am working on The Fifth Dragon, the final Magiskeep novel, of course. I have the basic plot set, and now I just need to fill in the story itself. It promises to be a satisfying conclusion to the epic.

But I am apparently too used to variation in my work habits. When I was teaching school full time, I had six classes a day and often taught as many as five different grade level/subject areas. Every forty-five minutes, my brain had to alter course to teach something different. Even during the years when I had fewer different classes to teach, I never seemed to have the same grade level twice in a row.

That thirty-eight year experience programmed my brain for a sort of multi-tasking.

Now, a word on that. According to some reliable science, our brains actually cannot mult-task--do more than one job at the same time. Instead, it flashes from one task to another in split seconds. So we work on one thing for a fraction of a second, then work on another a fraction later. Of course, we may be continuing to do reflex or habitual tasks at the same time--such as typing a familiar word, or cutting up our steak--but those actions often do not need thought and can continue purely out of habit. I find if I start to type a word, for instance, the thought process of typing that word is already complete by the time I see something interesting on the TV screen. Thus, I can still type the word while I actually take in the TV information.

But I digress, sort of.

My teaching multi-tasking seems to have left me with 45-60 minute concentration spans. I write or edit for about that amount of time and then feel the need to do something else. I will certainly be able to return to the first project, but only after a break working on another.

So at the moment, I have essentially three projects in the work at the same time. I am, as I said, working on the last Magiskeep novel. I am also doing a Grammarly check of Kingdom Beyond the Rim, as, despite all my previous efforts, there are still some typos in the published versions. And I am doing a Grammarly check of my romance novel, The Loving Cup.  Every now and then, I drift off to the Internet to read forum posts and comment on social media, as well as check on new ways to promote my books.

All in all, it does keep me busy, but it does slow each project down.

But, little by little works.