Sunk Costs in writing.

I'm already over 5000 words into "Ruby Red and the Robot" in two days and I'm realizing a couple of things.

1.) That I'm having a lot of fun.
2.) It's good the first draft. It won't require a whole lot of rewriting. I'm getting pretty good at doing this.

So if it takes just as long to rewrite something that doesn't work as it does to write something that does work, why would I do the former?

Sunk Costs.

“The sunk cost effect is the general tendency for people to continue an endeavor, or continue consuming or pursuing an option, if they’ve invested time or money or some resource in it,” says Christopher Olivola, an assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and the author of a new paper on the topic published in the journal Psychological Science. “That effect becomes a fallacy if it’s pushing you to do things that are making you unhappy or worse off.” Time Magazine.

It is incredibly difficult to give up on something I've spent years of my life writing. I have hundreds of thousands of words--at least ten novels--that I should just give up on. But damn...