Every once in a while I get a bug to reform myself and write things in sequence. Finish a story, start the next one, finish it, and so on. A nice, neat linear progression, no distractions from new or other old ideas. Just sit down and work through a story. End of story.
And every time I get that bug, I am stomping on it within a month. I can't even write consecutively within a story. I bounce from end to beginning to middle to another story entirely. It's not at all uncommon for me to finish something, and for the next week sit around working on three stories until I pick one to focus on, and then I end up opening something else I haven't touched in ages, or working on somethign entirely new. Most of my WIPS are disconnected chunks of prose and ideas, and usually by the time I get to the point of filling it all in, I've changed most of what was there originally.
I never learn that I don't think in a straight line. Even in day-to-day stuff, I'm bouncing between five or six things all the time. I do something at one task that reminds me of another task, and I work my way around until everything's been fit into its place. Writing rough drafts of papers for school used to send me into fits, because I don't do drafts. I add and tweak and revise every time I open a document, and when it's done, it's done, unless I'm having fits about a specific issue, then I send it off to someone.
I used to think that this inability to just sit down and produce a story from beginning to end and move on to the next was what held me back as a writer, but I've been producing pretty consistently (averaging a fanfic a month) for the last two years, so I think that was more an issue of what I was writing, not how I was writing it. But still, sometimes, it would be nice to think in a straight line.
So Mer gave "Little Green Gods" the red-pen treatment again, and made lots of excellent comments. But the most telling was that my writing style has shifted quite a bit in the last months, and it might be best to restart the whole story from scratch.
And I considered it for about ten minutes, but since I really didn't have any good answers to her other questions about the motivations of the character, etc. ("Because I said so!" not being a compelling argument in this case.), I decided that I'm trunking the two completed shorts I have, dumping all the half finished stuff in an "abandon all hope" file, and starting from scratch.
(Well sort of. I'm keeping "The Charlatan's Creed" concept, and rewriting that one from scratch. And I fully intend to plunder "Little Green Gods" for some of the better bits of descriptive imagery.)
Which doesn't mean a whole lot has changed, except that my current projects folder looks much neater, now.