Last night, I had the strangest trouble falling asleep. Normally, I try to think through some creative effort while I fall asleep, either a story or a code problem. For the past month, I've been pushing hard to finish my troublesome novel, Honest Impulses. Good grief, that link is almost exactly a year old, and for that year now, it has been my brain crack, something I wanted to enjoy, and kep iterating on rather than completing. What really stood out for me, what was really my brain crack, was the wham line [warning: TVTropes!] that turns not just the story but much of the Journal Entries' ethos on its head.
Last night, I finished the chapter where the wham line is delivered. It's not as whammy as I'd hoped; it's more of a slow-burning fuse thing that's going to reach deep into the future of the series, I suspect, with interesting consequences. But it's still done, it's out of my head, it's been mined, it's on paper. And it's no longer brain crack. Now it's just material to be refined into a story.
And when I went to sleep, there was a peculiar silence. My brain and I had nothing to say to each other. The Honesty trilogy is finally reaching finished draft status, and like a phoenyx rising from its ashes, the Steadfast trilogy may be coming after it. I don't have much clarity on Steadfast yet, but it's coming along. The second Fragility story is actually done, but may need some rewriting to accomodate events told in Honest Impulses.
I wonder what's next? Yo, Muse, get off your butt and come help me with this.