Unfinished books.

At 41K words I'm more than 2/3rds of the way through Gargoyle Dreams.  I've always finished a book I've gotten this far into.  (I've stalled at 30K words a few times.)

The plot is completely worked out, including the ending, so it's just a matter of sitting down everyday and doing my 1000 words or so and I'll be done another couple of weeks.

Which kind of brings me to another subject.

I have about 8 books I've finished that I wasn't satisfied with.  I always figured I would go back and redo them.

The thing is, it would take about the same amount of time to "fix" these books as it would to write a new book.  And the new books are probably going to be better.  These older books have problems, some of which can't really be solved adequately.

As new ideas come to me, these older books are receding into the past, and I'm now beginning to wonder if I'll ever go back and try to make them better.

Thing is, in spite of myself I do believe I'm getting better.  Just because of having written so much.  I'm much more comfortable with the whole process, the words seem to come easier, I tend to make less mistakes.  The process has become routine, the results are better.

It kind of blows my mind that I would let 500K words just go to waste.  I mean, it wasn't wasted experience.  It's how I did learn to get better.  But wow.  That's a lot of unused material.

Maybe I'll hit a creative wall, and no new ideas will come to me.  So I'll have these books as backup to work on, if that happens.

I still want to try to save Faerylander, but it needs the most work of all.  I'll just keep making stabs at it and hope a miracle happens.

I have 3 new books finished that I think are ready to be published.  (The Last Fedora: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murders; Tuskers III). Gargoyle Dreams is almost finished, and I hope to get Tuskers IV written very soon.  I have the new Virginia Reed adventure I want to write.  That's not even counting any new ideas I might get along the way. (I'm always going to try to write what I think is a good strong idea -- squeeze it in somehow.)

Only then can I really think about getting back to one of those older books.