Pondering and Mental Wandering

Last night as I lay on the couch semi-watching the Rays beat the BoSox*, I let my mind wander. The new house blues have me, and writing seems so far away. Sometimes if I just let myself drift, I can catch the current and get back to work. I was hoping for that last night.

Instead I started to ponder over the books I've already completed. Things I could still tweak to make them better. Things I may be able to do to improve their chances of getting published. I also went back over books I started a while ago and never finished. The cute mystery series still deserves to be written. The book with SF undercurrents is still waiting for me to find the right path. And then there's the new books I have waiting for me. The Untitled Somethin-Somethin, for instance.

I thought about Blink, and wondered if it might be better served if I warped it into a YA. (For the record, this is the book I finished but never really submitted because I was hot to write RTL.) I thought about the submission materials for everything that went before and wondered if those were the cause of my unpublishedness.

And I doubted myself. In fact, the longer I pondered, the more I doubted my ability to write.

So I went to bed.

Feeling better this morning. Of course, this post by Diana Peterfreund helped. Nothing gets me fired up faster than hearing about some idiot who has decided to make itself the authority on the ONLY right way to write books. (Not Diana - she's awesome.)

I don't know what I'm going to do next. Probably revisit all my query materials to see if they're as lame as I was thinking last night or if that was just caused by a case of the squirms. Then I'll decide whether to jump backwards into an old story or forward into something new. I did decide to leave Blink alone. Turning it into a YA would undercut the plot, and wouldn't serve any purpose except to jump on the 'hot YA' bandwagon.

So, what's on your plate? Ever get to pondering and wandering? Does yours lead to self-doubt or self-realization?

*found out later that the BoSox came back after I went to bed and beat the Rays... dang it.