Writing Progress: The Need for Flexibility

The Main WIP:

Silver Mask, my main work in progress is coming along. piece by piece.  It feels slow, but I've had to revisit my "thinking time" in order to catch up with the directions my characters are going in.  And so much is changing!

My last critique group helped me work out what scenes to include from my villain's POV.  Not my strong suit, writing bad guys.  I'm far less enamored with them than most of my book loving friends. But I understand the place of a good villain, in exploring the plot, world, and other things that my heroes might not be as exposed to.  So, I'm  giving it a shot.  But first it has to sit.  which I hate.  I just want to plunge in, but when I do that, before I'm ready, I get easily frustrated, disappointed in my own work. and so forth.

So Lord Koarv, my bad guy, gets to roll around in the back of my mind.

Meanwhile in the mental-work, I'm also working on the new climax/ending of the story.  I've played with a  few ideas, and one feeds into another old project that runs on a parallel timeline to Silver Mask.  I have to decide whether or not overlap will make sense.  If it does, I might get half way through Silver Mask, and switch gears to the other project.  That one should be significant;y shorter, after all, and then switch back and write the ending to Silver Mask.

Short Stories:

After my initial success, I thought I should revisit and reinvent some very old characters.  I figured, I knew most of their lives, the surprises would be minimal and I could keep it short.

Yeah. Right.

So Dezzine, my very first character is now leading me into a novella that should have been a short story.
The infamy she had in the original crappy child-scrawl has changed its nature, from one thing to something completely different.  That makes more sense, of course.

But also, the nature of the Curse, part of the history of one of the continents, has also changed.  I think this makes Dezzine and her story far more alluring, and fits the stories of this particular era into a better picture.

However, these events will play into the history that informs the project running parallel Silver Mask.  Likewise, the changes in the character Ethirin in Silver Mask made me revisit his people's history...

I know, complicated.  But the whole thing is changing for the better. It feels a lot like a rebirth of an idea.  

So, my progress might have slowed, but I'm on the right track.  And I'm focusing on more than one project---generally a bad idea, but for me, it often keeps me going while the knots in one WIP work themselves out.