Just Keep Going

I was on a roll on the new book, "The Pardy Boys," the first book in a series I want to write. It's the 'through' book I'm working on while letting "The Abominable Plan of Dr. Rasp" sit and get read. I was tooling along at a really great clip when I suddenly ran out of outline mid-book. What now? How will I keep going? But I did it, I just kept going.

It wasn't very comfortable at first because I was in limbo. Certain decisions had to be made that would affect the entire series of books. I began back-tracking, landscaping, looking forward and back, charting. I even went out of my outline form into an excel spreadsheet. Oh God, it was proctrastination, time-wasting, dilly-dallying. But then...slowly...it began to pay off. The wandering, meandering, lost-feeling journeying started to go from hydra-esque split roads back onto a single path.

In two days I'd gone from a roadblock to a road map. I had plots for all six books, and a throughline that connected them all. Not every 'i' is dotted, not every 't' crossed, but that would be procrastination. Now I'm ready to just keep going, and I did it by trusting that staying at the page would take me somewhere, and not letting myself off the hook because it seem too big a task.