It has become clear to me over the past couple of weeks that my writing methodology has become dysfunctional.
I have attention deficit disorder. I have it badly enough that it overlaps with Asperger's, although I'm not an aspy according to my doc, I just have really annoying ADD. I mean, really annoying. We joke about it, we ADD folks, calling it Leonard Da Vinci Syndrome, but it's really what it is: annoying. I have tried to cultivate the intense desire to finish something, to get a thrill from being done, but frequently what I feel is more a "Thank the gods that's over with!"
In order to deal with this, my strategy has been to rotate my stories: once the "ooh, shiny" wears off one work, I can turn my attention to another existing work, re-read the existing story to pick up the thread, and cackle gleefully that I now have something perfect with which to mess up the characters' lives even further.
This worked great for most of the least fifteen years, where I rotated between two or three short stories. It does not work well when I have hundreds of them, and "picking up the thread" involves sometimes reading through 20,000 words. I'm not sure what to do about this other than narow myself down to just one novel and a two or three shorts, never leaving the novel long enough to quite forget where it was going.
Because concentrating on just Caprice was driving me nuts. But the lashback has been brutal: the huge torrent of things I suddenly want to write is so huge I'm having the ADD dysfunction of being unable to choose one and do it, so I retreat into the more comforting realm of reading or watching TV or just geeking.