Ten Books, One Rough Draft, and Absolutely No Frickin Idea What I Was Doing

By now, I had reached one of those wonderfully ridiculous positions where I could look at everything I'd created and simultaneously think, Jesus Christ, that's a lot of work, and, I haven't accomplished a frickin thing. Both thoughts felt completely true. There was a completed rough draft of The Road Between Us. The series had become A Veil Sundered. I had ten books mapped out to one degree or another, characters and storylines that stretched across the series, years of worldbuilding, and enough background material that I was seriously considering creating Apokalyptika, essentially an encyclopedia for the universe. Because what somebody drowning in unfinished projects obviously needs is another project.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

The notes were everywhere. Character sheets. Timelines. Worldbuilding documents. Old worldbuilding documents. New worldbuilding documents that occasionally disagreed with the old ones. Outlines. Research notes. Conversations containing important pieces of canon I'd forgotten to copy somewhere sensible. Facts I knew we'd established but couldn't remember where. At one point, organising the universe was beginning to feel like it might become a larger job than writing the bloody thing. The frustrating part was that I was working constantly. I was editing. Researching. Fixing continuity. Building the world. Looking at Book Two. Thinking about the books after that. Researching publishing. Working on the website. Trying different ways to keep track of everything. I wasn't doing nothing. I was exhausted from doing too much.

Scope Creep

Every problem I solved seemed to introduce three more. Every good idea became another task. Every new piece of worldbuilding needed to be checked against something else. A character change in Book One might affect an idea I'd already mapped for Book Five. Solving a continuity problem might mean rewriting something I thought I'd already finished. Scope creep had stopped being something that happened occasionally and had become a way of life. And somewhere in all of that, I hit a point where I didn't want another clever solution. I didn't want another tool. I didn't want another new idea. I wanted to finish one bloody thing.

Just One Thing

That's what bothered me more than anything. I could point at an enormous amount of work. I could point at the manuscript, the worldbuilding, the outlines, the research, the characters, the website, and all the years I'd put into it. But none of it felt finished. Everything was still becoming something. Looking back now, I can see that I'd actually travelled an enormous distance. At the time, all I could see was how much road was still in front of me. That's one of the nastier tricks of working on something big. The closer you get, the more clearly you can see everything you haven't done yet. Here we are, at the end of June, and I have a universe. I had a rough draft. I have ten books worth of story. What I don't have is any real confidence that all this work was actually going somewhere.