Oh I Give Up

I've got four unfinished short stories. They range from nearly written to fully planned but barely started, and I'm not happy with any of them. There's a murder mystery that started out heading for 5000 words, then got more and more complex till it would occupy ten times that. There's another about a guardian angel who can't get his human out of an ethical quandary any more than the human himself.

It looks like I'm not good at writing to a self-imposed deadline. Anyway, here's a brief excerpt from the 'angel' story, listing some of the protagonist's previous human changes:

A married man keeps having affairs with women who remind him of his wife, even though she's waiting for him at home. He can only love her when it's not really her...

A young girl runs away from abusive carers and gets picked up by a much older man. When the police find her he wants to stay with him because he makes her feel wanted...

A wife stays with her violent husband because she needs to feel like a powerless victim. If she took control she'd have responsibility, and she can't bear that...

A man enters an arranged marriage to a woman he's never met because he wants to prove his devotion to the traditions of the homeland he's never seen. Then he falls in love with his wife and finds the homeland hasn't practiced the tradition for decades...

A rich widow sells everything and moves back into the house she lived in till she was five. But she's misremembered the number and street. She has to invent her childhood there to relive it...

A young boy feels guilt that he didn't cry at his grandmother's funeral. He starts to read the bible obsessively, hoping it'll make him holy. It convinces him his grandmother was a sinner not worth crying for...