Backgrounding the funeral book

I'm in the rewriting phase of the coffee house book, which is awesome but also a little scary and very intimidating.

So while I'm working on the coffee house book, I'm also doing the background work for the next book in the collection, which I'm calling the funeral book. I have my list of characters and the skeleton outline of the chapters, and I'm working on the character biographies and detailed chapter/scene outlines.

I did this for the coffee house book, too. Because of the way the coffee house book is structured, it was necessary for me to have a lot of background work done before I started writing. Well, if I'm being honest, it kind of started as a sort of procrastination technique because I was nervous about the actual writing part. But now I don't know how I would've gotten the story down without it. The character biographies let me create the vital parts of the characters relevant to the story and reference them quickly. The outlines keep the story moving forward once I get into it. And since many characters are overlapping in the different stories in the collection, I've created a file for each character so their stories in different books remain true to the character.

Besides, the funeral book background gives me something to work on when I need a break from rewriting.

That being said, starting the background work for the funeral book is starting to push me into that story's world, which, as you can tell from the moniker for the book, is a little bleaker than the coffee house book. And, in that way, going back to the coffee house book is a much-needed break from teh funeral book background work.

It's going to be a hard book to write, I think.