Multitasking

Some time ago now I decided to try my hand at a version of an urban fantasy, one that would combine the elements of my traditional mystery genre with a touch of magic. As excited as I was when I started writing Reflection in the Shadows, as I got deeper into the story, the fear that I wasn’t doing justice to either genre — mystery or fantasy — started to weigh heavily on me. Ultimately, it got to the point where I wound up setting aside the manuscript despite being just a hare past halfway completed.

I’ve never done that before, actually, and the moment I moved on to another story I immediately remembered all of the advice I’d heard over the years from other authors; to a one, they generally recommend pushing through the first draft of whatever idea you have just to see it to the end. It’s solid advice, for in a sense it forces you to face the decisions you made, plot-wise; it also provides you with a framework that could be further refined, especially if the bones of the idea are good (but the execution itself wasn’t).

Six months after I dropped the idea, I went back and re-read what I had… and discovered I really liked it, despite what I’d been feeling at the time. Unfortunately the timing was pretty bad, for I’d just begun work on another Vasily novel and didn’t want to loose the thread I had going on that story — so Reflection took another back seat. That lasted until this past fall; as I’ve recounted elsewhere, Belie took far, far longer to write than I’d planned and, mentally, I needed to put my two favorite detectives aside for a bit and work on something new. Reflection got another look — and while I still liked the nearly 50k I’d already written, part of me wanted to restart it from a slightly different angle.

I’ve always liked the idea of writing from the first-person perspective, and much of my angst over the initial manuscript was my choice to do it in third-person; it had been a practical decision, though, for I wanted to bounce back and forth between the two main leads in that story — Kate Oliver and Tenoch Vasquez. I’m not able to do that in the Sean/Vasily series, so it was tantalizing to be able to see this universe from two different angles at the same time. As I hit the 50k mark, though, I got a serious case of cold feet, leading to my desire to start over.

I did that and managed to get several chapters of the new format done before finding that, for this story, it just didn’t work. The dynamics between Kate and Tenoch drive much of the plot, so only “hearing” half of the story made it less dynamic. (There are reasons for this that I can’t get into without spoiling the story… at least, not yet.) So it was back to the original story — but the false start robbed me of precious time, putting me even further behind in terms of getting content completed for publication in 2025.

It didn’t help that the idea for my next Vasily novel had been percolating for a few months by mid-November; as I crested over the two-thirds mark in Reflection, my writer brain was itching to begin to tell the story that wouldn’t leave me alone. In what seems to have turned out to be a truly horrible idea, I decided to write Silenced side-by-side with Reflection, reasoning that when I was tired of one narrative I’d be able to reinvigorate myself by working on the other.

Now here we are in January and I’m scrambling still to get both of these stories buttoned up so I can tackle my planned April project; I truly should have known better, for dividing my attention like this has more or less slowed work across the board. Sanity kicked in a week or so ago, allowing me the grace to focus on getting one of them done so I can do then do the same for the other; I suppose it would have been easier had I decided to write a crossover Sean/Vasily story, for at least then the set of characters would have been the same (if not the voices). There is such a jarring difference between the world Kate and Tenoch live that bouncing between them and Sean/Vasily takes a fair amount of recalibration on my part. So far, at least, I’ve not accidentally had Vasily casting a magical spell, nor has Kate shown up at the Rancho Linda Police Department — but then again, I’ve not done a full edit on either of these stories yet, either.

As I wrap up Reflection, I’ve decided I like this new universe enough that there will be more novels in that series — depending, of course, on how it’s received. I’ve tried to walk a fine line between what I think of as “realistic” magic versus what you might find in a full-on fantasy story; using the framework of a police procedural helped to keep it grounded, but honestly, it wound up being a true delight to introduce a key magical spell just when the hero needed it. (Full disclosure: normal deductive reasoning solves the murder in Reflection; it felt like cheating to allow any magical shortcuts.)

The process was instructive, for sure, though. Never again will I try to write more than a single narrative at once — at least, not until I’m retired and have more time to devote to my writing.