Sweet Glorious Mental Breakdown

I love the fact that my brain seems to hate me, most likely due to the fact that it's an asshole.  Not gonna lie, I do hate the discombobulation that brain sometimes causes (and I just realized that I haven't used the word discombobulation since high school; it was the favorite word of one of my history teachers).

So I'm going to 'fess up: the online novel crashed again.  This is the third time in the last couple of weeks, and it's frustrating me.  One of the reasons I'm sharing this with you guys - documenting the calamity that this project seems to be turning into - is so you know that there are writing projects that have a tough time just getting on their feet, let alone out of the starting gate.  Another reason, of course, is because I like to rant.  It makes me feel better, and I have a hunch that there might be other writers out there who deal with this crisis as much as I do.  So hail, brothers and sisters!

I honestly don't know what it is I want to do with the online novel.  It seems like there are a lot of directions I want to take this project, but they don't seem to fit together.  I want it to have a good amount of action, but I want it to be a work of art like a Kubrick film.  I want it to be expansive, but I don't want to dilute the story.  I keep jumping around with the setting; 1890s, 1914, the Civil War years.  I want it to be an homage to the science fiction I love growing up, but I want it to be my own thing.  I want it to be true to science, but I also don't want to waste a lot of time on research that I ultimately might not even need.  And I don't even know what subgenre of science fiction I want to focus on: apocalyptic, time travel, steampunk.

I feel stretched in so many directions that I'm losing sleep over it.  And I know that's a dumb thing to do, stressing over something that hasn't even begun, but I stress because I know that I do want it to begin.  I don't want this to be one of those projects that just hangs in my head and never finds traction.