Tidying up
Recently, I've been struggling to figure out what I'm working on in terms of writing. February was a kick ass month where I released video projects and did nearly 60K words.
I ended up going through my entire list of open projects and discovered I had about 15 fiction projects on my plate. I also found I had writing folders I didn't recognize by code name. That and some other things made me realize I might have too much going on.
When I was making appointments with clients regularly as part of my IT job, I came to a truth that has helped me ever since. If you give someone the open ended question “when would you like to meet,” you're probably not going to get an answer any time. You've got SLAs, and they've got a hypothetical infinity to choose from.
If you instead suggest two specific times, they may accept one of them or they may propose their own. The effective range of possibility is still the same but now it doesn't look nearly as intimidating.
I've used random number generators for myself since I was a child. Assign each possibility its own number and run the RNG. Even if it picks one I decide I definitely don't want to do, running the RNG helped make that possibility real enough to turn it down.
On the other hand, it also helps to clear out the clutter.
So I made a list of all my active projects and moved the others to a folder I use for projects that are on hold.
The number is still fifteen (or fourteen depending on how you count) but now I can see it a little better.
And maybe I can make myself an RNG project picker in Python that will read project names from my fancy new table.
At the moment, the big thing is to get enough of my mental desk clean so that I can think and do a bit of writing.