Surely You Can Answer This One Simple Question?

Yow-zza.

Having just finished editing one of my short stories so as to make it more publishable, I sit here in front of my notebook, thinking about what I should work on next.

Problem: The more I thing about it, the more indecisive I become. How bad did this indecisiveness become?

At one point, I copied all of my long short stories to a floppy yes, I still use a floppy with the intent of rewriting them into chapbook form. Then I decided that I wanted to create a novel featuring those stories, plus a few interconnecting stories written in the second person (e.g.: You're driving down the road...). So I copied those already written stories too. Then I decided on doing something else, so I deleted all I copied to the disk. All of this within the span of four minutes.

In any event, I decided that this small view of a writer blowing his mind out would make a good topic to write about.

Without further ado, a few points that one's very own Thought Police can pounce on to prevent you from intelligently answering this question: "Shall I write, or shall I edit?"

Note: I previously touched on this topic from another viewpoint this past November.

1) Writing a new story, or editing an old one: I actually started writing a new short story about week or so ago, in a different type of genre that what I usually write in (semi-hardcore romance, for lack of a better description). Got only about two pages done before become stuck. I have a basic idea on where I want to go, but don't know how to get there yet. So I then I thought about taking one of my old short stories and working on that, which was the reasoning behind copying the stories to a floppy.

2) Editing an old story or continuing to work on a novel: Another quandary that one can find themselves in (which I did earlier this summer) is to choose between editing a story or work on a novel. During the fall of '07/spring '08, while I was trying to (unsuccessfully as turned out) land an agent, I decided to covert one of my short stories, A Betrayal of Vows, into a full length novel. In keeping with the theme of the original story, I wrote two distinctive plot lines. I wrote until I came to a point where I needed to go back to the original story. Yup, you guessed it, I went back and spent the next two months editing the original story.

3) Working on your second novel or working on your third novel: I actually started a second novel around the spring of '07. I gathered up all of my short stories and wrote about half dozen interconnecting stories as well. The idea was to slowly immerse the reader into the stories until they actually became part of the story (sort of like a Twilight Zone). I was doing pretty good until I got about thirty pages into the story, then stopped. The problem? I wrote myself into a corner and had no way to get out of it (still don't one year later). Solution? Yup, started a third novel. Summer of '07, I started converting a short story into a novel. Wrote about ten chapters before coming to a stop. Why? See #2.

To sum it up, this is the dilemma I'm facing. I have the following six options to work on, all of which are good choices.

A. Write a new story.
B. Edit an old story as a stand alone entity.
C. Edit an old story as part of larger novel.
D. Work on second novel.
E. Work on third novel.
F. Is something that I'm thinking about doing sometime in the new year, which would require creating a third blog.

So many things to choose from, all of which are causing my current state of indecisiveness.

My question to all of my regular commenters out there is this: out of options A-E, what would you choose to do?

And to all of my regular readers who enjoy reading my blog but haven't commented yet, what option would you choose? I would love to hear from you about this as well.

Update: I wound up doing C (editing an old story as part of a larger novel) and D (working on the second novel) during the past few days. It was simply amazing on how all the words start flowing again, once I began my re-write. I would like to think that it was do to the influence of the other wonderful blogs I follow on a daily basis. Many thanks for your kind words and good advice.