Else­where on the Internet, I was asked a question.

How many books do you work on at once?

And how long did it take you to go from one book to two?

Since the answer to the first ques­tion is two, I’m going to concen­trate on the second question.

When my kids were small, they were – no surprise to parents anywhere – very very work and time inten­sive. The 24/7 nature of very young chil­dren made writing a chaotic mess and an act of hopeful desper­a­tion. I had dead­lines, and we needed the money from meeting them. But infants do not under­stand this. They don’t under­stand that money keeps roof over head, among many other things.

So, when the kids were young — and until the youngest was about eight — I wrote one book at a time.

I had two series, but I worked on one book at a time.

When the youngest was about eight years old, and the oldest thir­teen, I had more time. The time itself crept up grad­u­ally, but — the desper­a­tion, the constant state of emer­gency, faded. And I real­ized, one day, that I … had enough time to actu­ally get writing done without weeping at every (constant) interruption.

That, in fact, I prob­ably had more than enough time. Like, maybe too much time. So I thought: Hey! I can just write more words and finish this novel faster. This would have been ideal. 

But in trying this I discov­ered that my writer brain doesn’t think or work this way. So I might write 1500 words in 2 hours, and then write another 1500 words — but those words would take 4 – 5 hours. My brain, and my book, slowed to a crawl. If I wrote more than that, I would wake up the next day and just … stare at a blank screen and every­thing would be diffi­cult and slow all of my writing day.

My natural assump­tion that more time = more words was proven, by exper­i­men­ta­tion, to be a faulty assumption.

But… I still had time. So at that point, I talked to my husband about either working more outside of the house or possibly working on more than one book at a time.

He was not terribly opti­mistic about my ability to work on more than one book at a time. I was deter­minedly opti­mistic. But opti­mism doesn’t get books written on time and to dead­line, and also, it causes a mess for everyone involved in the process (i.e. editors, publishers) if the opti­mism is unwarranted. 

To test this, I didn’t want to have a project whose failure could lead to those prob­lems. So I wrote — entirely on spec — a novel while writing a West novel at the same time. If I could do both without confu­sion, then I could, in fact, work on two concur­rent projects. 

On spec was wonderful, as there was no pres­sure. There was no dead­line. There were no expec­ta­tions. It was just me and the book in front of me. And I wrote the West novel in the morn­ings (as I do when things are some semblance of sane here) and then that on spec exper­i­mental book in the afternoon.

I finished both books. Well, to be fair, I finished the on spec book first.

But I discov­ered a few things about writing two books at the same time. First: if it took me six hours to write 400 words in one book, I could switch and write 1500 words in an hour. It wasn’t that I was having a bad day and it wasn’t some sort of writer’s block — it was my hind­brain halting things on one project.

Second: When drafting, I could work on both projects until I crested the final hill that lead to the ending of one of them. At that point, that book — the one that was now on the end stretch — demanded all of my internal writer brain.

But: I finished it. And then I started the Cast novel, while working on the West novel. 

The one thing that this does not take into account is the rest of the publi­ca­tion, or pre-publi­ca­tion process. I find it very diffi­cult to revise and write new words at the same time. The mental space is entirely different, and when revising, I’m trying my best to hold the entire struc­ture of a book in my head. So: writing new words and revising old words was not optimal.

But to answer the ques­tion: If I started writing novels in 1987, sold the first in 1989, and saw it published in 1991, my working on two books didn’t happen until 2006. So, pretty much two decades.

And here I will add the usual disclaimer: This is my process. Every writer’s process is different. There are writers who cannot work on two books at the same time. There are writers who will skip between multiple ideas – books, stories. If I can do this and you can’t, the only signif­i­cance is: that I write this way and you don’t. It’s not about being better or being better orga­nized or etc. It’s about how your brain processes both stories and structures.