If you have been subjected to umpteen viewings of Frozen, this title possibly made you cringe. But I’m referencing something else that regularly makes me cringe: writers’ unwillingness to start a new project because they got close to a contract with their previous manuscript.

Here is (unfortunately) an all-too-common situation for writers: we toil away for years on a project, drafting innumerable versions, workshopping it, taking it to critique groups, and polishing it until every sentence is sublime. We then send dozens of query letters, then scores, and ultimately a hundred or more to literary agents and perhaps small publishers that accept un-agented materials. We might not get any responses to 90 percent of those queries. Among the other 10 percent, most replies tend to be form rejections.

But maybe we get a handful of requests for a full manuscript. We respond to those promptly, hurrying up so we can wait. And wait. And wait. Six months and then nine months or longer. Maybe we never hear from those professionals who had seemed so enthusiastic in their initial replies, and they might ignore our polite inquiries that merely ask for a confirmation of receipt of the requested materials.

If we’re incredibly lucky, though, we get an email from the agent expressing a desire to represent our book in the hopes of selling it to a Big Five publisher or from the editor who wants to publish it in their upcoming season of releases. A call is scheduled. The agent says how much they love our work and how many publishing imprints they know that could be perfect for it—except that, after we sign a representation contract and more endless waiting, no sale is ever made because each one of those perfect opportunities went awry (always in different, unexpected ways). If we’ve attracted an acquisitions editor who wants to publish our book, perhaps they fail to clear the one major hurdle between us and publication: the editorial meeting where all editors pitch the books they want to bring out and the sales and marketing teams take potshots at many of the candidates, including ours, pontificating about why our book will be too tough a sell (e.g., we’re unknown, the book’s too similar to others in the marketplace, it’s too different, or all three—yes, it’s crazy).

All we know is that we got so close to publication. Surely next time, we’ll land the big contract. We decide that maybe we’ll tweak the manuscript—or rewrite one more time—and try again. Down the road, at a conference, we might get a best-in-show award for our submission or pitch, or we at least get some requests to submit the whole thing. More waiting, more disappointment. Possibly more near misses.

Meanwhile, we don’t write anything else because we’re this close to hitting a homer with our labor of love. We could self-publish it and move on—we could’ve done that from the start—but we keep going up to bat with the same book over and over, never scoring with it but having just enough success attracting fleeting attention that we can’t give up on our dream of hitting the big time.

Possibly the worst thing that can happen to some writers is “close but no cigar.” They then invest even more time rewriting a work that is already perfectly fine instead of starting something new. It’s like the time I hit four out of six numbers in the state lottery. Only two numbers away from the mega jackpot—this close! I won $26 dollars and then spent $260 (probably more) trying again because I just knew the next time I’d hit all six. I never did, and I could’ve used that money in wiser ways.

When we put all our efforts into one project at the expense of producing new and possibly better work, we nearly always shortchange ourselves. Nothing should stop us from continuing to pursue leads on our labor of love, but the problem is that we so often only do that rather than writing something else that just might be the next big thing. If you get a two-book deal with the new one, you already have a viable candidate for book number two ready to submit.

Let it go, folks, and write something even better next time. Maybe in this way you’ll find a home for both projects.