Cool Fish and Keeping the Mythos Straight

Right now, I'm editing my first novel set in a glittering galaxy-spanning multi-culture of the far future. And I just wrote a short story set a couple thousand years after my novel. I'm writing another story (that is threatening to become a novella or worse) set a couple thousand years between the two, and I have another three stories set in the same universe spaced out in the past. Add that to a prequel to my novel and two drafted sequels...and plans for another...and oh yeah, this is future fantasy - there's magic to keep track of too.

My brain feels a bit bloated at the moment, like a whale decided to drink ten gallons of coffee and have a beach party in my head. How can I keep the details straight? They change with every backward step through the writer's magic time machine. Names change. Places change. Whole cultures grow and disappear and reappear as new and cooler cultures. Rules of science and magic change.

But change is good. Change is motion, change is life, right? I might be swimming in an ocean as wide as the universe and twice as deep, and I might have only one small light strapped to my head to see where I'm going, but hey, there are cool fish down here. And cool fish are fun. As Dory would say, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming swimming swimming..."