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elfsOne of the lessons of GTD that I've never quite learned is that in order to meet your own needs about GTD, you need to have a reward at the end of the tunnel, something more immediate than "the pleasure of accomplishment" that encourages you to finish the task before you.
The Muse and I have therefore come to an understanding: On a writing day, if I finish 1000 words of work on Caprice Starr, I'll allow myself to turn my attention to any shiny I have hanging around (and believe me, I've got a lot of shiny). My hope is that Caprice will become shiny enough that she'll start to self-sustain and I'll be able to do the full 2,667 words per day on the Caprice Starr series itself, but in the meantime The Muse is satisfied that the shiny ideas won't get lost in the day-to-day work of writing a novel.
Holding multiple stories and hundreds of characters in my head is pretty easy; I do it all the time, obviously, and keep them all pretty well-segmented. (Some would argue, and I would agree, that I tend to work on classes of characters: This month, my stories are all about neurotic young men placed in alienting environments.) It will be more interesting if can maintain a hard continuity throughout the entire novel and then use that continuity succesfully into the rest of the series.
And lest my friends start to worry that I'm a little crazy, well, yeah: I've had "The Muse" as shorthand for the crazy ideas I get while I'm driving or showering, just out of the blue, like the shiny ones she gave me in the first memo: "Why don't you write a story about a young woman whose father left her and his manservant purposed robot behind when she was very young? Here, it's first person told from her point of view, I hope you don't mind," and "Why don't you write a story about an adult woman who's unhealthily attached to a security 'bot she was given when she was very young? Here, it's third person told from the outside, I think you'll like the format."
And The Muse has a sister, Code Fairy. She tends to bug me in the shower. She's more practical: "You've written six dialogs in the past three weeks; I bet you could refactor a 'create a dialog' class out of that mess."
The Muse and I have therefore come to an understanding: On a writing day, if I finish 1000 words of work on Caprice Starr, I'll allow myself to turn my attention to any shiny I have hanging around (and believe me, I've got a lot of shiny). My hope is that Caprice will become shiny enough that she'll start to self-sustain and I'll be able to do the full 2,667 words per day on the Caprice Starr series itself, but in the meantime The Muse is satisfied that the shiny ideas won't get lost in the day-to-day work of writing a novel.
Holding multiple stories and hundreds of characters in my head is pretty easy; I do it all the time, obviously, and keep them all pretty well-segmented. (Some would argue, and I would agree, that I tend to work on classes of characters: This month, my stories are all about neurotic young men placed in alienting environments.) It will be more interesting if can maintain a hard continuity throughout the entire novel and then use that continuity succesfully into the rest of the series.
And lest my friends start to worry that I'm a little crazy, well, yeah: I've had "The Muse" as shorthand for the crazy ideas I get while I'm driving or showering, just out of the blue, like the shiny ones she gave me in the first memo: "Why don't you write a story about a young woman whose father left her and his manservant purposed robot behind when she was very young? Here, it's first person told from her point of view, I hope you don't mind," and "Why don't you write a story about an adult woman who's unhealthily attached to a security 'bot she was given when she was very young? Here, it's third person told from the outside, I think you'll like the format."
And The Muse has a sister, Code Fairy. She tends to bug me in the shower. She's more practical: "You've written six dialogs in the past three weeks; I bet you could refactor a 'create a dialog' class out of that mess."
