Am I going to finishe anything?

I have three writing projects bogged down at the moment. A novel, a short story, and an entry for my political blog (AnArch Liberal). I'm proud of my work habits, but not proud of my accomplishments. For The Feral Bond novel, I've thrown out all the Ginger Snaps fan fiction elements that I started out with, and there's still a lot left there. The problem is organizing it now that the protagonist has changed. After so many false starts (in which one or another of the target audience gave a less than sterling review) I've begun to outline it using Tiddlywiki. (Thank you Ann Leckie.)

The short story is turning out to be longer than I thought. I've gone over the 6,000 word ceiling. Details have taken over the story again.

The blog entry, well, editorial and factual stuff has always been hard for me to write. I wish I could sit down and just write an article like that from start to finish. I have shown that I could just zoom-write 750 words in a half hour. Making it any good is the real challenge.

Reading is work. And it's the trick of the creative writer (with the help of an editor or two) to make the reader forget that their minds are working when they read. That's where story immersion is so important. Unlike a movie, which is very labor intensive, the reader does a lot of the storytellers work.

I find my eyelids getting heavy, just at the time of day that they should. That's one thing I had to do so I could write. I cured my insomnia.

Other things I've accomplished so I could write include:

• Living on a minimum amount of money.
• Staying off social media during the day.
• Living without a car, and making the minimum amount of errands.
• Having a reading regimen

There's more, but unfortunately, it's too close to midnight. I just keep on cracking at it until I get good results.

Decline

I stayed with my father a couple nights, as my sister and her husband had to go out of town. My father has a form of dementia called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. He's not losing his memory as such, he's losing his muscle coordination along with his ability to speak. He has trouble finding nouns and sometimes can't begin a sentence. Also, he hallucinates. Not a lot, but he insisted there was arm chair that matched his in the hall, and was both puzzled and embarrassed when I showed him there wasn't.

To make things worse, his skeleton is falling apart. He got a knee replaced, the other one is shot, he as a bad hip, all of which need replacements but doctors have deemed him unfit for further surgery. His ankles are bad, his spine has a few curves in it.  Oh, and his heart has five stents in it.

What did this? Stress. My father was a Madman. He kept himself under an appalling amount of stress through his life. He smoked and drank. He felt too much Catholic guilt and too much insecurity about his manhood to ever let himself live a healthy life. Also, my mother kept him under a lot of stress. It was a bad marriage, not too much nurturing there, and my mother was mentally ill. Watching their marriage turned me away from getting married, and made me somewhat cynical about relationships.

I've been writing but it seems that I can't anything done. I've been outlining the final version of the novel. It's the first time I worked with an outline. The purpose of it is to restrain my imagination. Here's what happens to me: I'll be writing a scene, the protagonist meeting another character. Okay, I embellish the secondary character with a tattoo. Then I think, wait, is that just a tattoo? What if tattoo moves sometimes, a la The Illustrated Man?

Suddenly, what was meant to be just descriptive becomes a set piece with then becomes a plot point. The whole plot is changed because I wanted to describe something cool.

Needless to say, I'm at the point where my confidence in my writing ability is low. When will  be done with the novel?