I’m in the strange position of having three works in progress this week, and like the dog faced with a multitude of squirrels, I’m in a bit of a quandary when it comes to focus.  The first draft of the second Zack Decker novel Cold Comfort is still maturing like good wine or cheddar.  I don’t intend to let it sit for three years, but I need to feel the spirit before I pick it up for the first re-write.  My second struggle is with the third Siobhan Dunmoore novel.  I’ve now restarted it for the third time, and though every attempt is getting closer to where I want to be than the previous one, I’m still frustratingly off the mark.  With those two fermenting in the background, I turned my attention to a project that’s been slowly growing in the background for a long time, and in the past three days, I’ve written thirty-six pages of the first in a new series set in the same universe and time as the Decker novels.  It’s a bit more of a coming of age story, at least the first novel is, but I’ve been finding so much easier to write than the next Dunmoore.  I can’t really explain why.  It just is, so I’m going with the flow.  The series and novel have tentative titles, but I’ll reserve them for the moment.  Suffice to say that as I’ve found with so many other things in life, sometimes the path of least resistance is the one that should be taken, so I’ll continue writing the first in the new series for now, when I’m not revising Cold Comfort, that is.  I guess Siobhan Dunmoore is just going to have to wait a little longer until a proper story line crystallizes.  Strange that my most successful protagonist is also the hardest to write – or maybe not.  Just so you Brakal fans out there know, I’m trying to bring him back for the third Dunmoore, but it’s not as easy as I’d like.  Some days, I’m thinking of writing a stand-alone on his struggles after the Cimmeria incident, but that would be yet another idea I’d go chasing and I’m already looking too much like my terriers when they’re faced with a target-rich environment of fuzzy-tailed tree rats.