this would probably be a bad idea

I spent last week at a writing workshop in New Mexico, reading, writing, critiquing, eating, talking deep into the night, and drinking.  Oh, the drinking.  The thing about hanging out with other writers and basically living writing for a week, my brain gets absolutely supercharged with ideas.  It’s about a seven hour drive home, and I was thinking about stuff the whole time.  The novels I want to write, the stories I want to revise and how to do them, the screenplay I think I’m finally going to tackle.  The problem is, of course, I can’t work on them all at once.  So at about hour five of the drive, I started thinking about how I could work them all at once.  Like, you know, on Monday I work on the Cormac novel, on Tuesday I work on the subversive epic fantasy I want to write, on Wednesday I work on the sequel to After the Golden Age, on Thursday I work on the sequel to Voice of Dragons, and on Friday I work on the space opera.  Saturday’s for the screenplay, Sunday’s for short stories.  I’d have to do more than a thousand words a day.  Like, fifteen hundred or two thousand words a day, times fifty-two weeks, would give me roughly 80,000 to 104,000 words on each project by the end of the year.  So, theoretically, I could write five novels, a screenplay, and a dozen short stories every year.  Then I might possibly get to every idea I want to write, eventually.

However, I think that ultimately this would probably be a very bad plan to actually try to do.

(On the other hand, as I understand it, this is roughly the schedule that Daniel Abraham, who’s working on an epic fantasy series, an urban fantasy series, half of a space opera series, the script for the Game of Thrones graphic novel, and various side projects, follows.  However, he’s also a demi-god of productivity.)

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