I have chosen my poison: I am going to leave all my other unfinished projects on the sidelines for the time being and throw myself into my suspense tale, Flowers for Someone Else.

This will likely be my written project for the foreseeable future – until I get sidetracked, of course – and it will possibly see me though until we go away on our theme park trip in the middle of July… although I hope to have it cracked by then.

I have got a very robust foundation here, and it is just as likely that I will find the finish line in a few days as it is to elude me for a few weeks. It’s difficult to tell. I know the destination; it’s just getting there with intelligence and sophistication that presents the hurdles.

I have over 1000 words (most of which are even pretty good), and it feels like the kind of story that really should not go on much beyond double that length. These kind of pieces are delicate acts of balance, and the longer they go on the more you’re fighting that pesky law of diminishing returns.

I have four new stories in progress that I would like to knock out this year, all of which I have mentioned here at one time or another. If I manage to finish all four I’ll be very happy, but I’ll probably settle for any two.

I last mentioned Scream, Pause, Play here in March, and it is perhaps the darkest and most ambitious of the items I have on my books. Although I have only written 600 words, it’s fairly well mapped out. I just have to put it all together.

Flowers for Someone Else (yes, it’s a new title) was coming along quite well in the early part of the year, but I set it aside in April when Jack and his buddy Patrick kept vying for my attention. It is sitting at 900 words, and I would say it is the most likely to see completion first.

Talking in the Fourth has also been absent from my playlist since March. This really started life as a throwaway couple of sentences that I didn’t have a place for. Sometimes that’s how a story comes together. Now I have over 1000 words and a good idea to back it up.

The 07:43 to Blackford Station has been MIA since February. It’s hovering just under 4000 words, which is quite deep into it for me not to have just knuckled down and figured the rest of it out. But I don’t think it’s there yet, and in a way, it still has the furthest to go before it sees the finish line. I may still have this one lurking when 2020 rolls in.

It’s certainly nice to have options.