I was looking through our craft bins for materials for a kid’s costume and ran across this oil painting I began over 15 years ago. It was while my husband and I were living in England. A friend of his visited and they planned a day of doing Manly Things (some sporting event or other), so I spent a blissful day working on this. (BTW the painting was inspired by a visit to Exbury Gardens, famous for its azaleas and rhododendrons.) But soon after, work got busy and I pretty much forgot about the painting, though somehow it managed to make it back across the Atlantic with us.

Now that I’m looking at it from a distance, it seems not half bad for a first attempt. Yet I don’t know about completing it. I don’t know if I could match the colors again. I kind of like it as it is; maybe I should just varnish it (to bring back the brilliance of the original colors) and frame it. Or maybe it should go back in the craft bin.

I am starting to work on writing again, and feeling the same ambivalence toward the works-in-progress I haven’t touched in the year and a half since my husband’s stroke. Around the time of the demise of the Signet Regency line, I was confused and getting contradictory advice from industry professionals as to what I should work on next, with the result that I have three works in varying stages of completion:

– My balloonist story (about half a close-to-final-draft, the rest rough)
– A Regency makeover story (three chapters)
– Another story (outline only) I’m not ready to talk about but which may be the most marketable of the three.

I also have an Idea File with a bunch of less-developed story kernels.

I just don’t know where to start. Although I have missed the writing so much it hurts, I’m feeling like someone reunited with a long-lost lover and suddenly not knowing what to say.

What do you think I should do? Revive one of these unfinished works? Start something new? Noodle around with multiple stories until a winner emerges?

All advice warmly welcomed, even though I don’t promise to follow it!

Elena

P.S. Don’t forget to visit tomorrow when we host Liz Carlyle on her charity blogtour. She will give away a signed copy of her latest ONE TOUCH OF SCANDAL and Harper Collins will donate up to $3,000 ($1 per person per post on the entire blogtour) to Liz’s favorite cat rescue charity, Cat Angels.