This thing about resolving to write fiction every day...

(or nearly every day, at any rate)

Is that as soon as you finish one story, you have to think up ideas for the next one.

That's one reason I made this resolution: to keep my mind limber...

But all this thinking has got me thinking... of all the story ideas I've had in the past, and which I could recycle ;-).

And there is a story I wrote -- a full length children's novel, as a matter of fact, that almost went down the road to being published.

( Long, meandering memoir here )

Long story short: while the book was good enough to go down the path toward publication, it wasn't good enough to go all the way. After a while, I attempted to go back and rework it -- tweak it here, change characters there, add a dab of angst and a cup of complication, etc. But instead of making it better I just made it worse -- like trying to brighten water colors by mixing them together. And in the ensuing years, I have lost both the hard copy manuscript and the computer on which the electronic file was stored....

But... in thinking about possible ideas for my next story, it occurred to me that I might just want to go back and try my hand at that novel again...

But not try to recreate it from memory.

Go back and ask that original question, fresh, with a blank slate in my mind: "What would happen if magic itself were dying, and the protagonist had to cross into another realm 'to find the Lost Spell' that would save magic itself?"

And see what answers my mind comes up with now, now that I grown, and learned, and grieved, and laughed for an extra 15 years....

But not yet. I think it's best, if I want to keep mentally limber (and I do), to work through lots of different, small ideas quickly. After I'm limber and confident and in good narrative shape, then I'll tackle "The Great Opus" ;-)

So, we're back to the opening question: "What should I write next?"