Playing the same melody as you're singing, at the same time as you're singing, is an interesting effect and works well for blues. It's more normal to only be playing single notes to do that, to give it that very sparse feel.

If your fingerpicking pattern is too complex, not only is it going to distract you by forcing you to multitask (per Patrick's comment), but it doesn't help the song either. The audience then also have to multitask in listening to a complex lyric and melody and a complex picking pattern. During singing, your guitar should be background filler.

For question 2, it certainly *is* possible to pick in the opposite direction. It doesn't feel natural to start with, but if you practise strumming whilst keeping your hand and wrist still and just moving your fingers in and out to strum, that'll get you started. When you're used to your fingers moving this way, single notes become easier. This also leads to the rasguedos (sp?) technique which is basically a triple strum of all three fingers slightly separated to get a "badabam" kind of effect, kind of like a strumming version of drumming your fingers.

Or of course, the other alternative to playing the same note twice is to use another finger. This is also definitely worth practising. Folk guitar tends to keep your fingers stationary on the top 3 strings, but classical guitar uses them on any string as needed. A bit of work on classical guitar pieces will help you there. (And yes, you can still do classical stuff on a steel-string. ;-)

Graham.