Two in the bush - why I string multiple drafts along

I like to tell myself it isn't really procrastinating - which is more than I can say for blogging about it! - but I’ve never been able to work on just one story at a time.

This might be partly because I started out writing (pretty awful!) shorts on fanfiction.net, or perhaps because for a while early in my career, I'd often 'multitask' at work by writing inside Outlook compose windows, where smut looked the same as all the actual work I was meant to be doing: that stopped in a hurry after one horrifyingly scary moment when I'd written a proper work email and then pasted the recipient address into the wrong window - I was an appallingly narrow moment from clicking 'send' on something absolutely not safe for work before I noticed! 

But even so when I'm writing I usually have at least two stories trying to come together - sometimes even three or four, though those usually mothball themselves until I'm willing to listen. 

It's not a typical recommendation to aspiring writers, but I find it helps me find the right mood. Often one tale wants pain, but one wants precision, or one demands a few thousand words of sizzling domination but the other's at the point where the characters just want to be held for a moment. So depending on my mood, I can usually shift between them not out of indecision but to please myself with whatever temptation is currently burning hotter.

I talked before about how, writing Sense of Submission, a character straight up refused to do the scene the way I wanted (and as I said in that post, she was right!). 

Sometimes, mid draft, a whole project will go silent on me, like it’s testing me, sulking, waiting to see if I’ll force it. That’s usually when I slip into the other one’s bed. It isn't cheating, exactly, but I think it's good to remind even writing projects that bratting doesn't cut any ice with me! 

Right now I have two stories sitting on the laptop.

One of them is political, grimy, and technical espionage (entirely the fault of one line I wrote into The Ruritanian Pretender as a joke, only to find I couldn't get it out of my head!).

The other is private, enclosed, filled with silence and breath: even more than Sense, it might be my manifesto of Submission and Devotion as being something more than kink, being the foundation of a genuine, normal marriage. 

In a bookshop, they'd sit on completely different shelves (well, no, they'd sit on the top shelf, the one which makes the assistant giggle when she sees you reaching up - but if I took out all the sexy bits and published the remaining fifty pages, they'd be very different genres). But having them both taking shape at once means I can write until one of them bites back. 

I've always found there's something about rotating projects that sharpens each of them. When I step away from one story and return to it weeks later, I can hear what was missing in the earlier drafts; phrasing I didn’t have the nerve to attempt, scenes that should have lingered longer, dialogue that needs to be said with a hand in someone’s hair and read with a catch in the breath.

Swapping things over helps keep the writing simmering and the heat trapped just beneath the surface until I let it out. 

Someone I chatted with on Reddit recently asked if I was writing to arouse myself or them, but to be honest the answer is "both, and neither", which I realise is as rule-bending an answer as "string or nothing". 

But the truth is, these days I write to submit to the story. In my early fanfic days I'd have firm, known characters and a clear plan of where they were going (spoilers, it was towards slightly flat, angsty kissing and groping scenes that make me wince to re-read them).

I don't do that any more. Nowadays, I  get ideas, inspirations, and I start work on them, learning the characters as I give them space to expose their thoughts and feelings and backstory, but I don't worry too much about the reader's response, or my own: the thrill comes not from knowing how a scene will end, but from not knowing what it’s going to do to me.

Some days it’s tender, some days it's sizzling hot that I'm distracted for hours after. Just sometimes it makes me burst into tears and I have to take a break because I accidentally tapped into a catharsis I hadn't been looking for. Other times what I get is clinical, or even semi-horrifying (Dr Lin in Mantamer genuinely scared me; I hadn't appreciated how much power she wanted over men until after I'd left her and Harry alone with nobody to stop her!). 

But I write to find out what the story decides should happen. 

This morning, with a story just entering act two, I woke up and found myself drafting the logical endpoint, an epilogue that absolutely falls into the "I'm not crying, the story's crying" category: it's the only place these characters can be heading. The other story, though, is only just getting started, and it's clamouring for a completely different kind of tear to be drawn out, beading and gleaming and twitching as the character throbs and begs for relief... 

I’ll share more soon, if procrastination calls. 

But probably not all at once; I know my readers like it when I make them wait.