Choosing a new project

[sarillia]

How do you go about deciding what to work on next? Does one just call out to you or do you have a process for choosing one?

Normally I can just pick one and work on it until it's done--though occasionally I end up deciding that I'm not ready to start the one I chose after all and it works better if I get back to it later--but lately I my mind has been all over the place and I can't decide.

Sometimes what I do is I make a list of my top choices and then I go through that list and make a new one out of my top choices from that list and keep doing that until I only have one left. But I can't seem to narrow it down this time.

Part of it, I think, is that issue of audience appeal I talked about before. Instead of basing it entirely on my enthusiasm, I can't help thinking about what might be most salable too.

Comments

[inkdust]

Ooh, 4 and 10 sound really cool to me. 4 sounds like a great start to a series and 10 sounds like it could have some great moral gray area stuff going on. "Bone magic" is an awesome term. 7 would probably be my runner-up.

So I would vote for one of those. It's funny, I can see where I would start combining things if the ideas were mine (1&8, 2&7). I guess if I want to learn to write short stories I need to stop doing that so much.

[splinteredstar]

Just popping in that I totally thought of combining 2&7 as well.

[sarillia]

The details I didn't include in the summaries make 1 and 8 pretty incompatible, but I could see how I might be able to canabalize elements of 2 into 7. 2 is actually also similar to another story in the type of magic used which is why I didn't include that other one in my list, so it might be best to just let 2 go and break off bits of it into these two other stories.

[inkdust]

Yeah, I can imagine how 1 and 8 could be quite different with more detail. I think 7 with elements of 2 would be really cool.