a new, new project

I'll just say it at risk of sounding vapid: sometimes, as a writer, the best idea is to follow ideas that feel good in the moment. Discipline is important, grit is crucial, seeing things through is kind of the name of the game, but when you're stuck idling for whatever reason... going with something that's come up out of nowhere can be empowering in a way that forcing yourself to finish the thing you had to pause is not.

Even as I type it, part of me (the educator part, mostly) implores me not to, lest I enable bad habits for all. I don't mean one should abandon everything the second life becomes tough or a project itself feels hard, more that one should discern when it's beneficial to think outside of the thing they said they were doing. The trick is seeing when you're reinvigorating yourself, not merely shirking the good friction of struggling wth an idea or its execution.

Go fully into a new idea, or chase the wild thought a Real Author never would. It doesn't necessarily mean rushing to finish anything at all. Motion of any sort can be helpful, and so can fun, I think I'm trying to say.

I know I mentioned last time that my eldercare duties trauma-induced dry spell would lift, and I knew how it would lift.

I didn't know where that energy would go, but I'd assumed it would head into MMM. Reader, it did not! It went into a discrete, new idea that shares a few themes with MMM yet may, ultimately, be more marketable than it. (Not that anybody who says so is automatically to be trusted, because what the hell is "the market" these days when trends and interests shift so quickly as we're all pelted with ads and pro-AI vomit at every turn?) I can't sit here and claim I've reached any legendarily vast word count, but I finally, once again, see a story in my head from start to finish and have the minimal wherewithal to chip away at its ultimate existence in the world. It even has a working title that may remain its final title, simply because I like it and it could look cool, typographically speaking.

On that latter note... if you could retitle the books in the initial trilogy of Threads of Wyrd, what would you call them? I'm interested in a thought exercise...