shiny new idea at 3 a.m.

You know the drill. You've just started a project. Maybe you're a few thousand words into it. Maybe you've got a nice-looking outline. But the project begins to reveal its problems. It starts to get a bit hard.

And then it happens. The seduction. For me, it happened at 3 a.m. this morning. My husband had just brought my daughter to bed for an early morning feeding. Half asleep, I cradled my baby and waited for her to go back to sleep. But then the idea popped into my head! With a title! And then the ideas just kept coming. Soon, my daughter's eyes were little slits, and I lowered her back into her bassinet. I tried to go back to sleep. But words kept jumping into my head. I had to get them onto paper. Er, computer.

So I crept down the stairs, fired up my laptop, and started a new outline. Before I knew it, an hour had passed. And I had 6 pages of ideas for my new project.

Now is the question many writers confront when they're dealing with multiple projects. Stick it out with the old one, or jump right into the fresh one?

I think I'm going to have to attend to this new idea. It's demanding that I explore it. And the crazy thing is... it's a memoir. Something completely new. At this point, I pretty much know how to write and query a novel. But I have noooo idea about nonfiction. I know memoirs are pretty similar to novels in that they need to be written and polished to a high sheen before the query process. But that's about all I know.

Well, I'll write it first. And then worry about what comes next.