How Do You Approach Multiple Writing Projects?

 by Paula Gail Benson

Lately, I’m finding myself working on several writing projects, particularly two mystery stories (one I’m sure is a novel, the other is still revealing its length). I’m happy for the opportunity, but wonder how to manage the writing effectively and to completion.

The reason I have this dilemma is that I attended the Summerville Book Festival and spent some time with author friends. (See my post yesterday at The Stiletto Gang with more information about the Book Festival.) Previously, Dorothy McFalls and I had been in a writing group together where we discussed our work in progress. She remembered a story I had been writing at the time and asked what happened to it.

I had not thought about that story for years. When I got home, I looked up my notes and was surprised to find how close it was to being completed. I began putting the pieces together.

The story is part private investigation, part monster (based on a local legend), and part science fiction. The protagonist is the daughter of an admired history professor, now a patient in a mental hospital. The protagonist is tough, plain-spoken, yet compassionate. She struggles with a strange ability to clearly see the past when in the location where it occurred.

Meanwhile, I had been noodling with titles I thought might be good for culinary mysteries. At the same time, I could not imagine bringing anything new to that subgenre. I’ve loved so many books featuring food preparers and sellers from the works of Diane Mott Davidson to those of wonderful blogging partners Debra H. Goldstein, Korina Moss, and Shari Randall. What could I offer that would be unique?

Then, as so often happens for writers, I suddenly had the idea for a scene in my head. It took place in a police detective’s office. He was questioning a young woman who wrote for a weekly newspaper. A killer had used words from the titles of the articles she wrote to determine how each victim died. The articles were about food and their titles each began with the next sequential letter of the alphabet. The young woman thought of that because she wanted to write mysteries, loved Sue Grafton, and needed the job to extend at least 26 weeks.

Was the young woman really the killer or had someone else used her work as a guide? If someone else, it had to be a person in the community or possibly a coworker of the young woman. Was it someone trying to help the young woman advance or trying to frame her?

I’ve used two notebooks to keep my work on each story separated. I’ve developed a writing routine where every day I write first on the new story, then the novel.

So far, I’ve been making progress. I feel good about what I’m achieving.

What do you do when working on multiple projects? Any advice is appreciated!

Shhh! Confessions from a Hopelessly Unorganized Home Library

by Julie Tollefson

I have a confession to make, and it’s embarrassing: Even though I have a master’s degree in library science, the bookshelves in my home lack even the most basic level of organization.

Seriously.

Adult titles and children’s picture books commingle on the same shelf. A biography of Theodore Roosevelt sits next to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Diary of Anne Frank shares space with a manga version of Hamlet. High school yearbooks, gardening guides, short story collections, classics. Several dictionaries and a thesaurus. They’re all there, scattered across the lovely custom bookcases that were my only true demand when we built our house.

When we moved in five years ago, the books went onto the shelves without a lot of thought. We’ll organize them later, we said. Well, it’s later, and we still haven’t found that spare weekend to impose order on the unruly shelves.

Usually this doesn’t bother me one bit, because I can almost always find the book I want with minimum searching. I picture it on the shelf—purple spine with white lettering, let’s say, about two-thirds of the way in on the shelf behind my favorite chair—and I walk right to it.

Except when I don’t.

This week, as I sat down to write this post, I had a different topic in mind. I wanted to refer to one of my writing reference books, so I went to the shelf where I know it should be (between a couple of young adult titles and one of two copies we own of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—which for some reason are not shelved together). But it wasn’t there.

I scoured the shelf. No luck. So I checked the other most likely places—beside the bed and beside the bathtub. No luck. My system, such as it is, failed me.

So I’ll save my original topic for another day, once I find the book I’m searching for. In the meantime, how do you organize your bookshelves? What do you do when your organizational system fails you?