Taking a Step Back

I've been making really great progress on Project 1 & 2 (that's what I call them at least).  My biggest issue right now is that with Project 1, I keep second guessing myself.  I wonder if I should have put more (or less) detail in certain places?  If there needs to be a chapter added here or there?  What about these minor characters - what drives them to act the way they do? Do I need to explain that in as great of detail as the major characters?  You know, things like that.  It's really impeding the progress I was making on Project 2.  Well, that and the fact that I scrapped almost 9800 words to start over, and am only at about 2000 right now.  :(

So what am I going to do?  I still feel the urge to write.  I need to write.  It helps relieve some of my stress, especially this time of year with the holidays coming up next week.

My solution?  I'm going to revisit an old friend.  It doesn't have an official title yet (although one is in the works, don't worry!), but I just call it "13".  I have 103 typed pages (single spaced. I can't stand to read double spaced when I'm working on a project, but it is handy when I've printed it and am proofing a hard copy), and just under 44000 words.  It took me several weeks to get it to that point, and I'm really proud of what I have written, but I got lost about 43,000 words, and found myself kind of wandering around with my plot. I set it aside and worked on other projects.  Now that I've had a few months away from it, I'm ready to dive in.

Of course, I'm slightly terrified that I'll start reading what I've written and decide that half of it is crap and it needs to be scrapped.  But, now that I think about it, I've learned a lot about my characters in the months off (even though I'm not actively working on a project, the characters are always there in the back of my mind, bugging me), and I'm not too worried about rewriting sections of the story.

So, wish me luck!