Image by Stefan Wiegand from Pixabay
There comes a point in the writing of a novel when you have to make a choice. Stay the course, or move on. I’ve never left a project unfinished with no intention to return, but I’ve shelved works in progress when the time just didn’t feel right to complete them. This gets trickier, however, when you’re writing a series.
I’d originally planned on publishing all three books in my young adult cozy mystery series in 2024. And I almost made it! Murder by Milkshake came out in July of that year, and Pralines and Creamed followed two months later. But editing that second book took much more time than I’d expected, and I couldn’t get the third one out by December; it was only half-written.
No problem, I thought. One of the benefits of self-publishing is that I make my own deadlines. I’d just set a new one for the summer of 2025. Only that didn’t happen. And neither did my new goal of publishing it that winter. I kept running into plot issues, and I was beginning to struggle with motivation. I’d been planning, writing, and editing Sweet Dreams books for six years. I was aching to write something new. And this darn manuscript wasn’t cooperating.
I started to question why I kept trying. Why I continued sinking time and effort into a book that just wasn’t working. I wondered if I was falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy—the illogical belief that we should continue to pursue a failing course of action simply because we’ve invested in it. It’s a fallacy because whether we quit or forge ahead, the investment is gone.
Maybe I should just cut my losses, I thought.
Yet at some point doesn’t every writer feel that their work in progress is a lost cause? Writing a novel is difficult. There always comes a time when you question everything. You simply have to push through.
So when do we give up on a project to avoid the sunk cost fallacy? And when is that just an excuse to quit when things get hard? I really don’t know.
I only knew I couldn’t give up on my book. Because I wouldn’t be happy with myself if I did. Because it’s part of a series that would then be unfinished. Because there’s this one girl who reached out to me on Goodreads after reading the first two books and enthusiastically asked if there were going to be more. I promised her there would be.
So I decided to keep going. I vowed I wouldn’t let myself start a new writing project until the third Sweet Dreams book was completed. I dove into edits again and again and persevered through each one. And guess what happened next?
I ended up falling back in love with the story.
It comes out in two weeks.
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