Confusion...My Writing and the Thrift Store Shelves

I can be a big old waffler and major fence sitter when weighing options and making decisions. But when I finally - and probably painfully - reach one, I do generally move along towards my objective.

Which is why lately it has been quite frustrating to hit a mental road block with my writing, banging my head against the wall (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) with a lot of...

Does that plot twist really make sense?

Would that character say that?

Should he really be the killer?

Because these are details I had thought about a lot and written copious notes on before I even started writing this book.

Things I thought were resolved. But apparently not.

To make matters worse, instead of focusing on figuring out these burning questions so I can move on and stop all the head banging, my brain has been pulling me in a totally new direction to a completely different story line and genre.

The kicker is, I am enjoying the detour. When I stop admonishing my brain for not working on the book at hand and let it wander where it wants, notes begin to flow, plots thicken and characters develop.

So, now I have to sit on my fence and ask... Am I just distracting myself with this new story to avoid solving the hard questions on the book I've been working on?

Or... Should I see where this new story leads me, even if that means several months of work put away in a dark desk drawer?

Not only are my thoughts confusing me, but so are some of the nick-knacks on the thrift store shelves.

Like this duck-turtle-fish feet-planter-soap dish with a jaunty propeller hat, and a bowl body that seems too shallow for a planter and a too deep for a soap dish. This thing really is confusing,
but seems happy.

And why does this whale have the chicken pox? How would a whale even get the chicken pox? And why would we want to purchase a virus ridden whale and display it in our house as a decoration? 

This guy really is a head-scratcher. He is an egg. With a scuba mask. Sitting on a raft. I thought at first this might be a soap dish - even though I really didn't understand the correlation between an egg and soap - but the raft is really too small for that anyway. 

So you have to ask yourself, for what purpose was he made?

Although, he looks happy too.

So, as ponder which path my writing should take, I will continue to roam the thrift stores to find a little funny in the day, maybe a forgotten item to re-purpose (although probably not a scuba egg-guy), or look for some forgotten treasure to sell on Etsy (also, probably not a scuba egg-guy)...or just to distract myself as I waffle away.

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