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

[inevitableentresol]

It's a reward in itself to be able to move a story from the WIP folder to the finished folder.

I never thought of that. I need all the tricks of encouragement I can muster.

I might put a big COMPLETED next to my finished stories by renaming them. That might do the same thing. Or I'll try moving completed stories to a separate folder and see how that does.

Perhaps I could copy them instead of moving and get the best of both worlds.

I couldn't do NaNo because I need breaks inbetween my writing chunks for reasons of basic bodily health - mostly sleep. I write badly on little sleep. I tend to not only write gibberish, I don't realise that I'm writing gibberish, and I tend to edit over the good stuff I already wrote and not save a copy before I do it.

I've got to the point where I don't even bother opening Word if I haven't had 8 hours the previous night. I've spent so much effort in the past, writing my little socks off on not enough sleep, to only get to a point worse off than when I started.

If I've had a good night's sleep, on the other hand, I can pull over 24 hours of solid writing on occasion. I think I did 27 hours during one stretch last month.

Not editing though. I do that in smaller, more sensible chunks.

I write mostly sci-fi (or speculative fiction, as they like to call it these days since sci-fi is so uncool) and ancient historical AUs. So it's a little easier for me to break my writing down by genres.