I’ve been puttering around with Book Two, as some of you might remember, and generally when I’m working on the novels, I’m not just thinking about the current book being written. This is self-evident by the sheer proliferation of excerpts and notes I jotted down and fleshed out on Books Two through Nine before Book One was even a quarter written so many years ago in France. Because I knew that Book One was merely the beginning to a series, I had to consider how actions and descriptions in Book One would affect the actions and descriptions in the subsequent books. One thing that annoys me the most about other authors’ series is inconsistency between books, and while some authors do this on purpose, I’d say the majority just forget how they described a person or place between work on books and just didn’t bother to go back and look it up again. I’m obsessive, hence the hundred or more pages of notes which grows every time I crack open the novels to look at them. And yet, I don’t feel I have enough notes to continue sometimes.

I guess that’s the problem I’m having at the moment. I’m working on Book Two and have about a chapter and a half written (Of course, as I’m writing, I don’t think in terms of chapters so much as events because I add in chapter breaks later.) but could probably have more if it weren’t for constantly stopping to evaluate where I am right now. I stop to consider how what I’m currently writing will affect the future interactions between characters, then I tell myself to worry less about it because I can always go back and revise it, then I remind myself that going back to revise it will probably result in inevitable inconsistencies or at least a change in tone/mood, and then I tell myself that if I’m so sporadic about writing in the first place because of all these distractions, that the tone will change regardless because too much time passes between the writing of events and dialogue. It’s odd how complicated writing can be, especially when squeezing it in between classes or sitting up late to scratch out a few last lines. It would probably be healthiest for the novels to just wait until I have time to sit down and have marathon writing sessions–such as this summer. Of course, that would entail a lot of arthritic pain, but creation is a painful process, I guess. Just look at giving birth. Hell, Lushbaugh constantly refers to the creation of his thesis as having birthed it. Of course, creating kidney stones is pretty painful too, yet much less desirable.

So I guess the point is that I’m writing–or at least attempting to–but that this time around, it’s going slowly because I just don’t have the time to really focus on it. I really want to remain consistent, and I’m greatly concerned with plotting the course of my characters so that there are logical jumps between actions taken in this novel and the subsequent books. I want the characters to grow and evolve, but I don’t want it to be drastic or unrealistic. These characters are people to me–as much as many of the humans I’ve encountered in real life (and in some cases, more realistic than humans I know). I want to do them justice by putting forth a little effort to make sure they stay true to themselves and that their worlds don’t come crashing down around them in a fit of illogical inconsistency. Is it sad that I concern myself so much with fictional places and people? Maybe. But they’re mine to worry about.