Too many projects

I’m shocking at not finishing projects. Big projects, small projects: I’ll get three-quarters of the way through, then get distracted by something else.

At the moment, I have about six or seven projects on the go:

Writing projects

• Writing the short story, Scholar’s Mate
• Writing the short story, Maria Moxon’s Little Problem
• Writing the short story, The Day Stephen Farrell Became Available
• Writing the short story, The Hospice
• Editing the novel, Super-8
• Editing the radio play, The Pending Apocalypse

Home projects

• Doing up the garden

They’re all projects I want to get finished by the back end of the summer, to get them out of the way before I begin my course. The short stories all combine to form the basis of a novel, along with a final, long-form piece which will bring them all together, and will serve as my end of course writing project. The long-form piece will teach me things about the content of the short stories which I will need to feed back into the text, so the short stories won’t be finished until the whole novel is finished.

In that sense, there’s no immediate hurry. It’s only the start of June. None of them are more important than the others, necessarily. But while I’m working on any given piece, I’m not working on any of the others, and that’s frustrating. There are only so many hours in the day.

I know what I should do: I should pick one and finish it. Pick another and finish it. Pick another and finish it. This is one of the things I want from the course, a sense of priority, even if the priority is arbitrary.