For God knows how many years, I've had this hazy idea for a novel set in the 1930s, either in Chicago or New York.  This one's a tribute not only to the Warner Bros. gangster movies of that time period, but also to the swing revival of the 1990s.  A down-on-his-luck aspiring singer gets a job at a nightclub run by the city's top crime boss.  Said crime boss is on the verge of war with a rival ganglord - and our protagonist is actually a voluntary stool pigeon working with the police to bring down both gangs before a violent gang war breaks out, claiming innocent lives in the process.

I keep killing this project on the grounds that I can't think of enough things to happen in the middle of the story.  I have my set up down pat, I know exactly how I want it to end, I know everyone's character arcs - hell, I've  even written songs for this fershlugginah thing.  However, the middle is and always has been non-existent, mostly because aside from romancing a lady singer and making friends with the band leader, our lead doesn't really have much to do.  He may work with the police, but he's not a cop himself, and I don't want him to be forced or compelled into volunteering because I think that's overdone.  As a nightclub singer, he's not exactly going to be privy to the crime boss's deep dark secrets, or likely to be in the middle of the brunt of the action (although when the action comes to him, that's another story).

Plus, I'm already working on too many other project simultaneously as it is.  The last thing I need to do is add another one to the pile.  And it wouldn't be the first time I killed a project for good. 

Still, the old ideas for what I already have been able to come up with pop into my head from time to time, and I like them too much to just abandon them.  Today I even came up with a title for this thing - Blue Lightning War, a line from Royal Crown Revue's "Hey Pachuco" (if you've seen the movie The Mask with Jim Carrey, you've heard this song).  But nothing new is coming to mind.

I don't know whether to let this thing finally die (or how to kill it for good) or keep kicking it around until I can finally do more with it.  Any thoughts on this?

--edited by Ian Nathaniel Cohen on 3/3/2014, 3:21 AM--

I don't think you should just let it die. Maybe put it away for a few years? I have many stories I haven't worked on in forever because I keep getting new ideas, and inspiration for other stories. But I still keep them around. Every now and then I bring them back up and I plan a bunch of stuff in them. For me it's kind of fun. My favorite part of writing is planning the story.

It's possible to keep them around without considering them dead, while also not working on them. So I suggest you do that.

~Linnea