It’s Tuesday. I say this more to remind myself than to remind you. I had yesterday off so it still feels like Monday, which will be awesome when I get to Friday and it has arrived a day early.

On Saturday and Sunday I worked diligently on my new cyberpunk/soft sci-fi idea. I like the way it’s coming together, I met a new character (as in, I had deleted the old antagonist and a new one presented himself most spectacularly), and I love this new idea.

And then on Sunday night I stopped working on it. Poof. Gone. Shelved. I knew this would happen, I just couldn’t have told you how. The story is still forming in my head, so I knew I wouldn’t even get a first draft done until after I had gone back and done another round of edits on Apathy’s Hero. But I was working on it to keep myself busy and to let the idea marinate.

And then the brilliant and wise Breanna emailed me with a thought, and prefaced it with something along the lines of “…are you going to throttle me if I suggest…”

I took her suggestion, because it’s something that’s been bugging me anyway and something I had thought about doing and if someone else thought of it without my prompting, it might be a good idea.

But I’m not telling anyone what it is (well, she knows). Not because it’s a big deal, or because it’s this grand and spectacular, vast, unbelievable thing. But because I’m kind of embarrassed about parts of it. Because I may or may not have made a big deal about aspects of it in the past, and probably shouldn’t have, so this isn’t a big deal either. It’s nothing. It’s piddly. It doesn’t even register on radar and you can ignore it.

However, that means I’m now joining the ranks of people who are working on a ‘sekrit project’. I hear about it all the time and never understood the point. Possibly because I don’t do a lot of collaboration on my stories anyway, so they’re all but secret. But now I understand at least one reason for doing it.

And it made me curious – what are other reasons? Ever worked on a story that you kept to yourself for whatever reason, or worked with someone else doing so? Why? Did it work out for you? Whether or not you’re still in the process, would you do it again?