I have a strange form of writer’s block.

Most people imagine writer’s block as staring at a blank page not knowing what words to put down. That’s not my problem. My problem is that I have about ten different pages in front of me, all of them half-full of words, and I don’t know which one to keep filling.

Coming up with “ideas” isn’t my problem (what exactly are these “ideas” people keep asking writers about?). It’s not very hard to have “ideas” for a premise and work out where it could go. Even working things out isn’t my problem. My problem is that I have ten notebooks, one for each premise, ready to be filled with the working out and the words and the ideas, and I don’t know which one to focus my time and energy on.

It’s like there’s a ten-lane highway and each lane is jammed with cars. There’s a tunnel up ahead and the highway’s about to condense into five lanes. It’s not writer’s block. It’s a bottleneck.

Ultimately, it leads to the same thing: not writing. Even when I think that maybe the cars should start merging – blend that idea into this premise and fold that character into this narrative – there’s resistance. They don’t want to merge. They want to be first through the tunnel.

I’m tired of not writing. But I’m even more tired of not being published. I want to write something that actually gets out there. I want to write a novel.

The only question is…which one?