the white stone

One aspect of being a photographer, writer, any kind of creator of new things, that I've never seen discussed, is when you grow sick of a particular work or group of works.

For example, photographs - you have to look at them closely, again and again and again. At the first contact print, or first download (I'll stick with the contemporary process). Skimming through the entire download, seeing what's what, deleting obviously faulty pix but not deleting those that are only possibly faulty. Going through slowly again, discovering which of the ones you thought would turn out well at the moment of capture actually caught something. Puzzling out the possibly faulty - do you remember what you thought you had? did you just get it wrong? does it just need to be cropped? cropped to what you thought you had in the first place, or is there a different way to see it and crop it? what is there now that you've cropped it? is it better if you include the white stone at the bottom right, or crop it out? which of the other variables (exposure, color balance, intensity of color in light or in shadow) would make a picture out of a pic? 

Repeat, repeat, repeat. When you've gotten down to the 10 out of 30, or 2 out of 100, that actually have something to them, print, revise and print (repeat as necessary) - should you print bigger? should you print smaller? should you put it aside as hopeless? not yet? stare at it for a while longer? tack it to the wall until you're almost sure that you love it or hate it?

Repeat, and repeat, and repeat. If you're going to mass reproduce, to print a book or create a web gallery, select, edit, sequence (a whole new opportunity for struggle and doubt), discover what isn't working in the new medium, revise, revise, repeat, repeat. If you're not about to vom, it's a miracle. The phrase is ad nauseam for a reason. 
Ditto with a written work, I know from experience. Entirely apart from the question of how the rest of the world and fate will regard what you're creating, is figuring out your own regard of this word, that phrase, this incident here or before, that adverb, this character (too flat? too round? too unbelievable? too believable?), this whole damn book/story/poem.
You know those clicky things used to count people entering a venue? You could keep one of those by your side, click it whenever you think something's right or something's wrong, even when they're the same something, even when you're looking five seconds, five minutes, or fifteen years later. You'd never stop clicking.