As a wise person once said, variety is the spice of life. If we woke up every day and did the same things, had the same experiences, and felt the same emotions, everything would get pretty dang boring, pretty dang quickly. When it comes to writing, the same principle holds true. You can’t do the same thing over and over indefinitely.

I’ve been writing nearly nonstop since I was about nine years old, and I almost never get bored. Part of that might be because I’m obsessed with stories and will read anything. But I attribute it in large part to my overlapping principle – essentially, use variety for productivity.

As you all know if you’ve been keeping up with my writing updates, I recently finished the third draft of the A Landscape of Shadows sequel (whose title I will reveal soon, I promise). I sent it away to the first reader, and now I’m somewhat patiently waiting to get it back with revision notes.

I’ve found from past experiences that this liminal space is where it becomes very easy to fall into a slump. It’s like finishing a great book series or getting to the finale of a show; you feel lost without it and you don’t know what to do next. It’s difficult to kickstart your interest in anything else. The most effective way I’ve found to avoid this slump is to eliminate the liminal space.

What do I mean by that? That inter-project lull can be deadly. So, instead of working on one project and then another in an orderly chain, I make sure my projects overlap. As I neared the ending of draft three of ALoS2, I started another novel. This was the project that came to me in the middle of the night months ago. I made a doc for it and dumped all the details in, but I let it ruminate while I revised.

By the time I opened that doc up, a few weeks prior to turning ALoS2 over to the reader, I was raring to go into that world and start writing. Having this alternate project also meant that when I started feeling fatigued on ALoS2, I could give my brain a shakeup by switching to the other one – which we’ll call TWC for now – and give my imagination a break in a different world.

The good news is, you don’t have to make it your own projects that overlap. Sometimes, I would make the overlap happen with a book I was writing and a book I was reading, because reading can be a “project” too. The trick is just to keep the creative juices flowing, whether through creating or consuming art.

Do you get post-project blues? Have you experienced the inter-project lull? And how do you escape it?