When possible, I like to limit myself to two big projects at a time. Right now, I’m staring down four: The Deepest Breath’s rewrite, Storming’s research and first draft, the Annotated Jane Eyre’s first draft, and, in another month or so here, the first draft of my next non-fiction craft book. I’ve been scheduling like mad, drinking lots of coffee, and trying to figure out how best to fit everything in to make sure it all gets done by the appropriate deadlines.

I’m having a lot of fun with the Jane Eyre book. I finished my initial note-taking read-through of the book and am typing up my notes. So many juicy things for novelists to learn from! It’s certainly taught me a thing or two, and I look forward to sharing them with you when the book comes out in 2014. My editor Rachel Randall at F&W Media likes the direction I’m taking the book as much as I do, so we’re good to go! Now I get to buckle down and start pounding out the first draft.

I’m also plugging along with my rewrite of my historical novel The Deepest Breath—just passed the three-quarters mark, and now it’s full steam ahead to the climax. This is the part where all the so-called “little” changes you made throughout the previous two-thirds suddenly require a bunch of loose ends to be tied up. I liken it to running your fingers through a skein of yarn. It all goes pretty smoothly, until all the tangles snarl up at the bottom. I haven’t made any major plot changes, mostly just tweaks to character arcs, but even still I’m having to pay attention to make certain everything in this all-important last act is in line with what’s come before. I feel like the book is dramatically better this time around, which is always a nice way to feel when finishing up a major edit.

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Q. I was hoping for an unbiased opinion to a short question. My novel is all written in first person. After we completed content editing, I noticed that my narrator's thoughts weren't consistent. Sometimes she thinks in third person about someone right in front of her, as though talking to the reader, sometimes in first person, probably the way she'd really think it. I'm assuming the latter is correct? ―Lianne Simon

A. Your instincts are spot-on. In a first-person narrative, there's usually no good reason to put the character's thoughts into third-person. Since the entire narrative is technically the character's thoughts anyway, you don't even have to distinguish them from the rest of the narrative by putting them into italics. Just let them flow with the rest of the narrative. You might enjoy this post I wrote awhile back: "5 Ways to Write Character Thoughts Worth More Than a Penny."

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Brave, smart, witty, good-looking characters are all the rage—and for good reason. But sometimes one of the most important characteristics gets overlooked in the mad rush to the character quality buffet. This is sense.

A couple months ago, I talked about how stupid characters make for stupid stories. Few would argue this. But the question we find on the flipside is, “How do we keep our characters from being stupid?”

That’s actually way harder to do than it might at first sound. The deck is stacked against our characters. First, there’s the fact that the smartness and sensibility in any of our characters can only measure up to our own smarts and sense. And we have to be smart and sensible enough for not just one person but a whole cast! Pile on a few plot problems in which a little character stupidity would do wonders to simplify matters for us poor, beleaguered writers, and before we know it, our characters aren’t looking so smart anymore.

Ensuring sensible characters requires a two-step approach:

1. Consider your characters before you even start writing them. How do they behave in the situations in which you’re envisioning them? If they’re acting less than sensibly now, before the difficult intricacies of the plot start interfering, they’re only likely to degenerate as you delve deeper into the story.

2. After every scene, take a minute to analyze your characters’ actions and reactions. Can you see people behaving this way in real life? And, if they did, what would be your reaction to their behavior?

Turn on your baloney detector, and never let your characters get away with unreasonable behavior―except, of course, when the story demands it.