The appeal of distractions

My friend recently posted on her blog about wanting a knitting project to end, how she's tired of it already despite loving to knit and having it be a release for her. A friend of hers commented on that post and said that she, too, becomes tired with a project and finds her eyes roving over other patterns and thinking of other projects she'd love to do instead.

And it made me realize (for the umpteenth time) that writing is no different. Many, many times throughout my college years, I've been assigned a writing project but wanted to do something else halfway through. Sometimes, I'm excited about that first project. Either it's an intriguing concept or it's a story that has been simmering on one of my backburners for years.

And yet, no matter how excited I am initially, I am bound to covet a different story while writing the first one. I don't know why this happens. Take my thesis, for example. That novel has been waiting patiently for about four or five years before I finally got to writing the first third of it for the thesis project. It was intriguing, it was exciting, it actually challenged me every day because it was written in a different style (first person, present tense) from a perspective I don't usually write (a male) and it had some severe handicaps (blindness, medieval-type era) that affected what I could mention. And yet, I kept having ideas for another novel, an easier one from a girl's perspective that is closer to YA than literary. My grandmother read the first half of the first chapter and loved it, and has been waiting for the rest of it ever since. I even won a small award on that little bit of story. I'd love to finish it for her before something happens. I'd love to get it published and place the finished book in her hands. And yet, I didn't choose it for my thesis.

And now that I'm considering NaNoWriMo, I have to limit myself on what stories I can work on. I chose to work on that YA story for Grandma during November, after I had managed to move beyond a particular scene and expand the story. I haven't been able to move past that point for at least two years. Yet the moment I finished my thesis, there was dialogue for the other story. But I can't work on it now because I have to save it for November. And what do I want to do? Work on it.

And what do I have in my head in the meantime? A third novel that I started about three or four years ago that everyone loved. It needs some drastic revisions, rewrites, and general plot and characterization overhauls, but it's still there... whispering... taunting... luring... I put that story's folder on Google Docs so I could get to it during down times at work. And how much do you want to bet that when November finally rolls around, I'll want to write in this third novel instead of the YA one.

Oy. Anyone else have this problem?