It's Getting A Little Crowded In Here

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” ~ Isaac Asimov, Life Magazine (1984)

I read this quote and couldn’t help thinking of all the stories I’d leave untold if I had only six minutes to live. As I’ve written on the introductory page of my website, I get most of the inspiration for my books from my dreams. When I wake up, I’m left with images of untold stories and, in some cases, the names of characters. Oftentimes, those dreams that turn into stories appear in my brain at the worst possible times.

Right now, for example, I’m trying to work out the details so I can write the outline for Green, the second book in the Elementals of Light series. I like to jot notes down in a notebook and work out the details of the novel before I actually write the outline. I handwrite my outlines. This deliberate process helps me slow my brain. Many times, good ideas form while I’m writing by hand. I mark down notes in the margins of my outline of the ideas and fit them in where I can. I rarely stay true to the original outline. My outlines are more fluid — constantly moving and adjusting to how the story flows. Many times, my characters tend to go off in an unplanned direction. and I have to scramble just to keep up with them.

For many of my stories, I have multiple plot lines going on at the same time. So to keep these plot lines separate and organized, I’ve taken to writing the different ideas down on colored notecards. That way, I can make sure the various plot lines get more or less equal time, unless I want it otherwise, and I disperse the plot line evenly throughout the story.

​Now that brings up a point I want to make about my writing: Each story, in my mind, has a single theme, which is the overall point or purpose of the story. Theme and story for me are used interchangeably. Finishing the theme, or story, often takes several books. Within the main theme, there can be many plot lines, which are the metaphoric highways that I take the reader down to get to the end of the story. And just like physical highways, there are many roads that one can take on or off the highway. Similarly, my plot lines can, and often in my stories do, intersect with various subplot lines, or metaphoric roads that allow the reader take a more leisurely trip to the end of the story. Keeping these all organized for each story can be quite taxing but is essential for the book to make any sense to anyone other than me. It's the map the reader follows that delineates the path to the ending destination.

For Blue, the first book in the Elementals of Light series, the book was fairly simple. It followed the plot line of Ashley and Matthias, as told in first person from Ashley’s perspective. In Green, I’ll be continuing the Ashley and Matthias plot line, still in first person from Ashley’s perspective, but now I’m going to add the plot line for Kali and Tobias, as told first person from Kali’s perspective. This adds an element I’ve never done before in a book: Two different first-person perspectives. This will require a little more organization than the first book, so I’ll utilize my notecard process to keep the plot lines separate. The third book, Red, will be adding a third plot line and will be three first-person narratives. I'm excited to try that!

While I was working on the outline for Green, I had some ideas pop into my brain about my ever-present Project 13 book. I had to have started and stopped this book at least a dozen times over the past few years. It isn’t that the story is uninteresting. Quite the opposite. I’m eager to work on it and finish the book, but something else always seems to pop into my brain to derail the process. I’m about two-thirds done with it and have the remaining one-third already detailed out and outlined. I simply need to sit and finish writing the darned thing. But, of course, this won’t be a standalone book. This is only the first book of probably five that will need to be written to complete the overall story I hope to tell.
 
As I was contemplating my thoughts for finishing Project 13, some ideas popped into my head for the next book in the Chosen of Bella Luna series. Book Eight of this series was derailed by the appearance of General Lokun Abakkus several years back (See The Arkainian Chronicles, 7/2/25). Now, instead of next writing Book Eight of this series, I’m planning to write an adjunct book completely dedicated to Killian's taking over of the Lupine Council because that is the entire purpose of the series. It is the story, or theme, and I don’t think I can do it justice if I simply add it as a plot line in Book Eight. It needs its own dedicated book. And the Council needs to be under Killian’s leadership before I can conclude the story with the plot lines that I want to follow in books eight and nine. Book Nine will officially conclude the story, and as much as I will be saddened to see my beloved characters go and live out their Happily-Ever-Afters, I want to get the story finished. I see the nine books as one long story. So far, I’ve completed only seven of the nine, and so, to me, the story is unfinished.

When we lived in the Seattle area, there was a store we shopped at often called Gargoyle Statuary. It was from there that I adopted several of the beloved gargoyle figures and statues that grace my house, and especially my office space. I follow the store's posts on Facebook, and a new post they did depicted a gargoyle that, if I still lived in the area, would totally now be living in my office and getting acquainted with the others that live there. I would have made a trip to the store and brought him home with me. But I don’t live near Seattle any longer, and a trip to the store is unrealistic. 

This post, however, has begun getting ideas percolating in my mind about the untitled book I’ve started regarding a gargoyle named Claude Pierre, who finds his purpose in guarding Aimeé Reid. The book takes place up in Maine and follows the plot line of the two characters mentioned. As of right now, I think the book is just under halfway written, but I have copious notes about it scattered among several notebooks. Once I gather the ideas I’ve written, I’m pretty sure I will have jotted out enough ideas for the second half of the book. I really want to finish this one, too, as well as the others that I envision for the story.

Also insisting on his story getting finished is the ever-present and ever-demanding General Abakkus. I have three of the five books written in my Arkainian Chronicles series. This story follows Lokun and Star as they fulfill their part of the Rukkus Prophecy, which is the theme of the series. And I could leave it at that one plot line, but no. My brain has to work two other plot lines into the story, and each of those other plot lines have multiple subplot lines woven through them. This year, I wrote Book Three, Blood Blessed, which I hope to publish either later this year or at the start of next year. To keep the plot and subplot lines organized, I used a stack of notecards with three different colors to represent the three main lines. By the time the outline was done, I had a stack of cards nearly an inch and a half thick. I know Lokun very well, and he won’t let me rest until the story is finished. He’s most annoying that way. I already have the next book in the series, Blood Battle, worked out in my head, though I’ve not started writing anything down just yet. For now, it's just another big part of the constant goings-on inside my head.

Just thinking of the books I’ve listed so far, I’ve got at least six swirling around inside my brain with probably at least three dozen characters, each having their own conversations and evolving stories. Going along with these books and characters are about ten to fifteen follow-up books to complete the various stories that each of the aforementioned books are part of, because as I’ve mentioned before, to me I see the entire series of books as the story, not the individual books within the series. That’s a lot going on inside my noodle.

Now, to add to all of that, I had a dream the other night that has gotten still more ideas percolating for yet another story. This story, as of right now, is only three books. I don’t have many details worked out about the plot lines yet, and I haven’t quite figured out the theme, but I have the three main characters as they’ve appeared to me in my dream. The story is connected somehow to the Chosen of Bella Luna series, as it centers on three women who are part of a coven of witches that goes by the name of The Sisterhood of Bella Luna. I have the first names of the three women, and I know that they own a company that does home repairs, maybe a handyperson service. Or maybe they just do odd jobs. In the dream, I see them building a deck on the back of a house, but I have no ideas yet why, or whose house it is, other than there’s a werewolf inside the house watching them work. That’s all the dream gave me, so now I have to let my brain do its thing and work up all the details. 

The problem is that my poor brain is already overtaxed with thoughts of the other books, and I only have so many rooms at the inn. I’m afraid my Noodle Motel is already overcrowded.

How am I supposed to get all these stories out of my head and into print? I simply don’t have enough hours in the day to accomplish it. My thoughts right now are to spend the remainder of this year publishing as many backlog books as I can, so I can focus next year on writing. My books tend to be on the larger side. They're more like extended novels of around 120,000 words, some bigger and some shorter. So using 120,000 as the average, I have six books that are in need of my immediate attention. So using math to figure it out, the six books will be, in total, about 720,000 words. There are 365 days in the year, so that means I’ll have to write about 2,000 words every day next year to get the six books written, which, of course, isn’t realistic. I’ve never been able to write more than two novels in any given year, simply because I need time to plot out the book and handwrite the outline. Given that, it will take me a maybe two years to write the six books, since a few of them are already partly written. It will take at least another seven to eight years to finish the remainder of the stories for those six books. That’s all assuming that I don’t have another dream in the next decade that leaves more books and story ideas swirling around inside my head.

And that’s not even all the books I have in process. Those are just the ones that are dominating my immediate thoughts. Additionally, those are just the ones from the one pen name, Lyra Zonder. I also have books from my second pen name, Annie Rife, which are mainly thoughts on the Visions series with Xander and Dani. With them, the story could go on for seven or more books until I conclude the theme I want to finish. I’ve completed writing three books and have published the first one so far. I’ve deliberately tried to not think about that story because it’s so involved. It simply has to be the only book in my mind at the time, or else I’ll get too overwhelmed. 

When I’m writing a Xander book, I actually create an evidence board and hang it on my wall. I have all the facts inside my head, of course, but as the characters in the book progress along the specific case, or, more often, cases, I add the details to the evidence board that the characters themselves are creating to make sure their conclusions are justified and not unrealistic based on the information they know. Right now, I simply don’t have enough brain capacity to even think about this story, so I’m forcing the thoughts to stay inside one of the many file cabinets I have lining the walls of my noodle.

So, how do I get all the stories out of my head? I do it the only way I know how, and that is to write. As Charles Bukowski once said: “He asked, 'What makes a man a writer?' 'Well,' I said, 'it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.'” I don’t know how many years I have left on this planet, but I can say without hesitation that I have no plans to jump off any bridges. I might have many years to live, or the cancer could come back, and I might have only a precious few. I can’t dwell on that, though. I need to focus on today. I have my office, which is my creative bubble. The plan is to spend maybe two to three hours every morning writing. The morning is my quiet time. I get up before either my husband or daughter do, and so I can go in my office and write before they get up for the day. I’ll get done what I get done. I’ll pick a book and focus on that one book until it’s done, and then I’ll move on to the next one. Although in some cases, I could easily spend the entire day writing until my fingers are too cramped to type any longer. It may come to that some days, but most days I’ll have other things that I need to do.

First, I have my daughter’s schooling to focus on. My husband and I homeschool our fourteen-year-old daughter, and that needs to occupy several hours every day. Plus, I need to cook. Recovering from cancer as I am, nutrition needs to be the main thought for very meal, and this means cooking as much as I can from scratch to avoid ingesting potentially hazardous additives or preservatives from processed foods. I love to cook. It relaxes me. So I have to make time for meals. I like to plan at least one meal a day where we sit at the dining room table as a family and connect. I have a rule of no electronics at the table so we can talk to one another. Communication is so important to a happy and healthy family. I also have an old, persnickety hundred-and-fifteen-year-old house that needs cleaning and maintaining. After a century, things tend to break down and need attention. I also detest clutter, and in a nearly 3,000-square-foot house, clutter seems inevitable. Along with clutter, dust and dog hair seem to multiply on the furniture and floors overnight. I think on any given day, I can sweep up enough dog hair off the floor to form a small furry animal. And, as if all of the non-writing things aren’t enough, I have my neglected painting that I would like to get back to. I haven’t set foot in my art room all year. Painting is therapy for me and helps me relax. I'll get there. I hope.

Every day, we all have 24 hours, which breaks down into 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds. That’s an awful lot of time every day in every year that I still have left on the planet. That being said, if I was told that I only had six minutes left to live, I wouldn’t type a little faster. I’d type a lot faster.