As I'm tooling around this morning and working on getting things done, and since as I said yesterday I finished a chapter, and need to spend some time getting things planned out and sorted for the next bout of writing, I'm realizing that I need to get started on another project at some point for a number of reasons.

  1. So you I can avoid getting stuck if a project sticks.

2. So that I have something when this project is done, which it's getting closer and closer.

Knitters (among others I assume, it not being terribly original,) talk about project monogamy. The idea begin that if you concentrate on one project at a time, you're more likely to finish things. Typically I'm pretty narrow minded with regards to my knitting projects, but of late I haven't worked in this way--I think that my trials with "sleeve knitting."

This isn't to say that fiction writing and knitting follow the same sort of creative cycle; similar, for sure, but it's hard to translate from one to the other. For instance, while in both there's a lot of up front work, in fiction writing the end stage requires about as much work/attention/time as the beginning, but in a sweater, you can think a lot about the next project, as you're finishing the present project, because you need to buy new yarn, and have a plan. To make matters easier, I would point out that by the end of a project, it goes "faster" than the beginning: you generally have the pattern memorized, anything that can go wrong already has, so you don't have to worry about that.

The problem is that while I know I should and I want to, I'm a little worried about distraction and "what next." Anyway...