Quinn Coleman

I’m going to end up with 0 subscribers if I keep this up…

I’m sure y’all have heard of the theory that we’re all balancing a mix of glass plates and plastic plates; some are much more breakable than others, and we have to determine which one’s we’ll allow ourselves to drop, and which we need to keep spinning. Because, without a doubt, some are going to get dropped; that’s just how life is.
(I’ve heard the phrase with balls, but…as it says on the tin; we’re not talking balls.)

Often times, my brain is like this with my books. I have a working queue of roughly– *looks at list on wall beside monitor screen* fifty-eight…? –books I plan to publish in my life time.

Are all these going to get done? Lord only knows. Has the list grown this year alone and it’s only April? You bet it has.

Some of these are plots that pop up out of nowhere; a lyric, a poem, another book inspires them. I’ve been struck by an idea by eavesdropping someone else’s conversation, and immediately I think, “Oh! OH! Now THIS is going to be my most popular book!”
Then I look at my queue and go…hm…
Down to the bottom you go…

As I work on my current 6 book series, it’s impossibly easy to be editing book two, and I start to eye the plot of book five and think, “Well, it would be okay if I bounce over here for a bit and add in this segment and scene and oops, I just wrote 10k on this book that I won’t be publishing until 2026.”

And that’s when the plates start to wobble.

It’s a slippery slope for me; I love to focus on one project at a time, but on occasion, my brain tells me that’s not enough; I’m not productive enough; I’m not showing enough results.

Literally.
Having 3 published books and working on a solid, amazing, 500+ page book is NOT ENOUGH?
Excuse you, brain?

Because of this, I’ll hop into one of the further books in the series (and it’s almost worse that it’s a) a series, and b) a SIX book series…lots of material to play with) and those plastic plates that are books 3,4,5,6 begin to wiggle around in the air–right along with the GLASS plate, book 2. Which is the only one I should seriously be focusing on right now.

What starts to shake along with those are…
Glass plate: mental health
Glass plate: exercising regularly
Glass plate: oh yeah, I still have a full-time job right now
Glass plate: when was the last time I ate more than an ice cream sandwich and scrambled eggs…?

You get the picture.

So in these times, I’m getting into the habit of telling overactive whack-a-mole brain that it is actually OKAY that I’m only doing one project right now, and it’s OKAY to have rest time as I work on it; the rest time is not time that needs to get filled with other projects…it’s time to–shocker–rest.

Besides, I can still take notes for those later books, but when I finally get to writing them, I get to fall in love with the plot all over again. Bonus, I’m not tripping on a bunch of plates I’ve dropped and cleaning up glass.
(See, if we went with balls, I’d say ‘I’m not tripping on balls I’ve dropped’, and that’s got a whole different meaning…)