Lots of people read more than one book at a time, and now we seem to be flirting with the idea of writing more than one simultaneously.

While we’ve been getting back into the swing of things with our nightly writing routine, which has felt like learning to ride a bike all over again, we’ve also been brainstorming plot ideas based around a really nifty bizarro premise that Jen came up with.

There are certain traits we’ve identified as essential to the Rune Skelley brand, and Jen’s concept embodies some of them right out of the gate. It’s dark, for one thing. Character driven for another. But there’s a particular type of story world that we like to build, something that’s made all the more strange by its seeming familiarity. That’s where the brainstorming is focused right now, figuring out the setting and what’s freaky about it.

We’re thinking about handling it as a sequel to something we wrote last year. The themes resonate, and that story world’s mechanicals suggest a direction for a plot. So it’s promising, but we don’t want to get too locked into one view of how we might do things.

Besides, we still have about half of the outline to get through in our current project, and there are a couple of other novel drafts awaiting our tender revisionist ministrations.