SHINY NEW THINGS

When I worked on NaNoWriMo last month, I found myself coming up with new ideas during the writing process. I jotted down notes where I could, and in one case wrote a couple of pages. My friend Anna calls these ‘shiny new things’.
But, now that NaNo is finished, I’ve received some very good input and advice regarding the story I’ve been working on for the past eight months, and it involves a huge rewrite.
So, my ‘shiny new things’ will either have to wait, or I can try and intersperse them while rewriting my manuscript. Plus, there are several short stories I’ve written in the past several months that I want to re-write because shiny new ideas have sprouted to rework these short stories.
Anna and I play something we like to call ‘plot ping pong’ when one of us comes up with a ‘shiny new thing’ and we toss around ideas via IM to work out plots, characters and stories. I think we both get so much out of this method and it helps with just tossing out random ideas and just letting the creative process flow.
Now, the problem with all this is we end up with so many different stories on the go at once, or so many ‘shiny new things’. We try to devote equal or bits of time to each of them. It’s great to have something else to fall back on when you hit a wall on the ‘big’ project you’re working on. But, there are so many shiny new ideas popping up all the time, you wonder if you’ll ever finish just one…completely. I’d like to think so.
How do you handle your ‘shiny new things’? Do you have many projects on the go or just try to do one at a time?