I usually like to do the "crafting" part of my writing before or after the "creative" part of the story.

That is, the planning out of the plot, figuring out how many and what types of characters I need, figuring out thematic structure, I try to do before doing the actual immersion into the writing.

Then, after I come out of the fictional dream, I like to look at with a "craftsman's" eye to see how it can be improved.

One of the things that's bothering me right now is that I'm doing a lot of mixing up of Crafting and Creating on the same day, sometimes the same hour. They are two different parts of the brain and it's whipsawing me a little.

Unfortunately, it is necessary, because I really don't have the ability to dive into the fictional dream until I've cleared away the inconsistencies--because if I do, I'm likely to make the inconsistencies even worse.

I've learned my lesson. Linda has been warning me for years that by not writing sequentially, I was playing with fire. But I got away with it enough that I constantly had new material. Where I didn't get away with it, I set it aside to work on later.

Well, now is "later" and it's proving to be harder than I thought.