The Lost

This is going to be short because both my Surface and my Alienware laptops have been possessed by demons and are refusing to function correctly. Let's see if I can beat the weird on this box before it nails shut my digital coffin.

Projects. Do I abandon them? Yes. All the time.

Lots of ideas. ALL THE TIME with the ideas. But I have a strict rule. If I'm working on another book, the idea takes a number and stands in line. This means a page or two of notes and/or character information to remind me what caught my attention in the first place. Then it gets stuck in a file. When I finish a book and want another project, I rifle through my idea folders and see what jumps out at me. Some ideas were never that great to begin with and they die right there. And I will say that 90% of projects that get abandoned are abandon at the idea stage when they have very little invested in them.

But we're really asking about books. Not ideas. And yes. I do have books that I've abandoned. Completed books that will never see the light of day simply because they represent learning curve. It's painfully obvious when you look at them that I had no idea what I was doing - or that I was in the messy process of figuring out what I was doing. Maybe. We've talked about them before.

I have a book that's finished and sitting - not quite abandoned - it's stewing, I think, because it had a flaw in the telling of the story that I believe I now know how to solve. No problem. I'm just in the middle of finishing a series. It gets priority.

So while I won't say 'never' - I will say that I haven't yet abandoned a book in progress since I got published. But the temptation to do so right about now is REAL. I'm at that whiny 'but this is haaaaaaard' stage of composition and that's the point when historically, things have broken free for me in figuring out the last bits. I'm counting on that.

Assuming that at least one of the computers will cooperate. That I've made it this far without incident (the Surface likes to random close what I'm working on for reasons as yet unknown) I suspect I have a heat issue on this box. Heat death. It took my gaming box and now it's coming for my writing box.

I might as well go for a swim in the gator pond.