Idea Hamster Syndrome

I’ve been trying to decide "the next thing" I want to write about for a long time now.

• I could write about passages in the book I’m reading (The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging).
• I have some notes on revision that I’d like to explore.
• I’ve saved news articles on the Wayback Machine, the Flickr 365 Project, grammar choices in online writing, and ways to entice boys to read more.
• Yesterday in Books-a-Million, I found 5 more books for my collection of young adult fiction that incorporate computers in an integral way. I need to write about all of them.
• I have a bunch of notes on effective writing online that I could work into something.
• I’ve printed out calls for manuscripts from English Journal, Voices from the Middle,  and Teaching in the Two-Year College,.
• I’ve been doing some thinking on how scrapbooking and cardmaking magazines and resources talk about writing, from motivation to writing prompts.
• I have notes in several of my "idea" journals that I could write about.
• I found a number of starters for Lists of Ten that I could finish out and post.

I have plenty to write about—and I am writing.I have lots of scribbled notes, on paper and in pixels. It’s not blank page syndrome.

It’s sort of the opposite. I have all these pages, but I can’t decide which one to explore more deeply and publish. It’s Too Many Full Pages Syndrome.

Or maybe it’s more like Writer’s Attention Deficit Disorder. I keep spinning from topic to topic to topic, unable to focus on any of them long enough. The ideas are all interesting, and I don’t want to ignore any of them long enough to click that publish button.

Back in 1994, at the Computers and Writing Conference in Columbia, Missouri, Eric Crump called me an "idea hamster," someone who just keeps scurrying around on the hamster wheel, pitching out good ideas. I have notebooks, bookmarks, annotations, rough draft. There are dozens of ideas I’ve spun out. I just have the quintessential problem of an idea hamster—how do I manage to stop scurrying around the wheel and settle down with an idea long enough to get something done?