Grinding Gears

So a very notable thing happened on Thursday: I finally finished writing through to the end of the second draft of The Shivering Deeps. Yay, right? It is pretty cool to be done with it, although I’ve noticed that one major event of the climax doesn’t have a necessary Chekov’s gun inserted earlier in the narrative, so it just seems to come out of nowhere as a deus ex machina. So I’m thinking I’ll go back and put that in, and possible some other scenes that I jotted down while I was working on the outline, before I hand it over to a beta reader. Who will hopefully not completely eviscerate it. Or if he does, will do so in a productive way.

This has left me somewhat at loose ends as far as what to do with the rest of my time here at Rainforest. Due to an unlucky twist of fate, I have homework that needs to be completed by the end of Sunday, so I’ll spend more time working on that. (I already took part of today to head on over to a place with wifi and download the necessary research.) I also started working on the bare bones of another piece, but while the pre-writing is interesting I don’t think I”m going to get any drafting done on it while I’m here, and I like to have a wordcount to look back on at the end of the day. I ended up writing some fluffy nonsense yesterday, and will probably continue it today, but it doesn’t feel like anything I’ll ever share.

It leaves me with a bit of a conundrum. Rainforest has proven to be amazing for me to get words down, and I’m glad it let me reach the end of that draft. But now I can’t figure out what to shift to working on in the time I have left. I want to do something else that’s destined for publication, but my creativity-brain might just need some time to rest. Still, it’s frustrating to have the gears grinding when I just want to shift up to the next one and get rocking.

What do y’all end up doing when you hit a big milestone on a project and your brain ends up sort of adrift after? Do you just not write for a few days? Write silly things? Finally finish your Ratbag/Hawkeye crossover fanfic? I’m curious how other people handle this, so I have some more ideas of what to try next time. Looking at how long it took me to do this rewrite, for Shivering Deeps that’s only a couple years away! Clearly it’s time to get planning. XP

P.S. I wrote this blog post, so I suppose that’s something, right?