I currently have ten stories in progress. The longest one is at 66,000+ words and the shortest is at 188. Overall, I have more than 107,000 words of unfinished stories waiting to be finished. This is the natural result of keeping multiple stories going at once.
I’ve been working on the premise that I should always be writing whatever seems the most interesting to me to keep my interest levels as high as possible. However, that presupposes that just pecking away at the current story wouldn’t trigger new interest when I finally hit on something that felt right for the story, and also presupposes that getting tied up in something else wouldn’t delay a return of interest for the original story. And as it stands, I can’t know the answer to that.
As much as keeping multiple stories going seems to help me write more when the writing isn’t going well, I can’t really know that for sure, primarily because when I started doing it my numbers were already falling and I was trying to prop them up in whatever way I could.
Even though 2019 was a big improvement over the two years before, my best annual word counts came in years when I was still writing only on one book at a time for the most part, and I haven’t beaten those numbers yet.
Now, I don’t know that this means anything. I’ve been in a weird transitional phase with my kids for several years now, because it’s their college years and only one seems to have settled a bit, and the other is home a lot and has a work schedule that is all over the place, but I thought it was worth a true experiment to find out if sticking to one thing at a time might be better for me in the long run.
This came about because I’m frustrated that I’ve lost interest in several of the stories I have in progress and I blame that on the fact that I feel like I’ve been working on some of these stories for far, far, far too long.
I just can’t hold interest in something that long. It’s starting to feel like it would be better not to even start the book at all if I’m not going to be able to devote myself to it and finish it within a reasonable span of time.
Something has to give, because to be frank, I’m losing interest in almost every story I write these days long before I make it to the end. I’m not used to that, and I don’t like it. If I can’t get that under control, I can’t improve my daily word counts and I can’t meet my goals.