My therapist thinks I have ADHD tendencies.
That’s a fancy way of saying that I’m happiest when I am multitasking. I love round-robining through three different things at once, doing a bit on each until I wrap all of them up with pretty bows on top.
Another way of saying this is that I’m a high-functioning ADHDer. I’ve learned to work with those tendencies, and to make them work for me.
This came up again recently in my writing life. I’ve been stalled out on my latest WIP, my first “Forever Cycle” novel that seems to have me stuck in a state of Writer’s Wait. There’s something I need to figure out there before I can move on. So of course my solution is to start up not one, not two, but three additional projects.
I shifted gears last month. I quickly knocked out six chapters of my new River City novel, and started posting those last week on my blog.
I planned out the basic plot points and characters for Coredivers, the second book in the Redemption Cycle, which I will start on soon.
And I have a short story in mind for an upcoming climate change anthology that’s tickling the nether regions of my mind. Rain, rain, always rain…
It should be overwhelming, right? But no, I’m happy as a clam (and why are clams so happy, anyway?). So many ideas, so many spinning gears ready to manifest themselves on the page to bring my readers back to some beloved places, and maybe a few new ones.
And it seems to work for me. After all, I wrote the Ariadne Cycle and the Oberon Cycle – six books! – in tandem, which let me make some really cool connections between the two trilogies.
So I forge ahead, content to follow the paths where they lead me. And if I get stuck again? There’s always project number five.
To my writer friends, does your writer brain work like this too? If not, what’s your crazy writer process?