New projects are like kittens, cute and adorable, unlike their older, grumpier cat counterparts.

Dr. Katherine Gunny, an accounting professor at UC-Denver, made an offhand comment about the fallacy of the new project. It appears all shiny and worry-free compared to papers that have been through a round or two of the review process and have the inevitable endogenaity concerns.
New projects haven’t been taken for a test drive, presented at a conference, or had editors point out the obvious, which usually can be fixed with expensive datasets or labor-intensive hand-collection of data.
It’s exactly the same when writing fiction. I sent my manuscript Crete to an editor in 2015 and have been plugging away at the edits over the last few years. Until I got to the hard rewrites.
I just didn’t have the brainpower to fix my plot and shore up the structure while I was also getting a PhD.
It was also more fun to work on poems, songs, and short stories because they gave me closure.
Now that I’ve adjusted to being a LA ex-pat in CA (followed by the covid re-adjustment), I’m ready to spend an hour a day writing. And I have a bunch of shiny, new stories begging to be written.
I need to finish the series I started, because to do otherwise is to succumb to the fallacy of the new project.
And at my age, in this age, I can’t afford to waste time spinning in circles.