as I've said elsewhere in the thread, I have certain things that I feel like need to exist and that I've been given the task to write. so I keep working on them because I could not do otherwise. but a lot of the time this falls down to intuition where I have something that has captured my attention but that I am maybe not prepared to do justice to, so I give myself time to do more research and figure out what about the thing I'm writing makes it necessary -- what problem I'm trying to solve or what core there is that knits all the pieces together