The Carnival is Over

....and what a ride!  But after having spent so long rewriting and editing and polishing the same 4000-odd words, I feel the need to focus on something new for a week or so and then I can dive back into my ms and tidy it up to submit the old fashioned way.

I've been blog trawling and having a great time (albeit wasting precious writing time) doing it.  Found some new sites that I've bookmarked and some new books that I will be adding to my "I Want To Read This" list.  Lots of people are blogging about post-comp blues and giving great advice about subbing the old fashioned way which made me think about a post I read on a blog months ago.  Don't you hate it when you can remember some of the post and/or blogger but not enough to find the blog/post again?  Anyway it was about the four Ps of writing and I can remember one of them was Perseverance but I can't remember the other three!  I think one was Planning but I'm only guessing now.  So I went in search of said blog remembering vaguely it had a blue background (helpful? not at all) and it was by a woman who wrote YA novels (handy? again, not so much). 

But in my trawl I did come across an interesting post by Mary Danielson called Your Book is Different and you can read it here in full if you're interested.  But it did get me thinking about a story I had all planned out until a VERY famous author wrote a TV series with a plot VERY similar to mine.  I was crushed and had shelved the idea until I read this today and now I'm thinking: maybe time to unshelve and start writing?  Given Mary's points about voice and my characters vs her characters etc.  What pisses me off the most is that I had this story mapped out years before the tv series aired but I was being Scardey-Pants Elissa back then and figured tomorrow would be a good time to start - and you know how effective that argument is to a procrastinator don't you?  So for the last eight years or so I have been collecting ideas, writing down the plots and characters and then......well nothing.

And therein lies my current conundrum - which of my ideas do I start?  So I said to myself; "Self, make a nice, neat list and then pick".  And that's what I'm going to do.  Hopefully I'll be able to wave some techno wand and I can magic up of those very attractive word count thingys to sit over there *waggles thumb and rolls eyes*.  Just don't pay too much attention to the goal on account of the fact I'm going to be guessing that bit, okay?