The calm after the storm

Reading back to my last post on worldbuilding, behind the words I can sense the desperation I was experiencing at that time: I felt like I really needed a rope to pull me out of the morasse, and writing a list of Do's and Don'ts to myself was part of that. Worldbuilding is great, it's vital, but it's also the mother of all rabbit holes.
Since I finally got to the finishing line with Thalassa: Fire and Flood, I've been vaguely productive in a behind-the-scenes plotting and fixing kind of way, but not done much writing. That's a shame, because the writing is the bit where the magic happens, not the chopping of ingredients preparatory to the actual cooking bit, nor the teasing and tweaking and finessing during the edit phase. All three elements are enjoyable and rewarding in their own way, and I don't think they are necessarily a fixed sequence (at least, not in writing: when cooking, it's best to stick to the recipe). Even so, writing is the time when things come together.
Now at last I'm back! I've been writing around the continuing obstacles of day job + occasional post-concussion days of vertigo and brainache, and there's something on the hard-drive again. Not at all what I expected, and not what I'd been planning. But as ropes-out-of-the-morasse go, it's been good. Nearly at the end of draft 1.5 (the first half of the book is in 2nd draft phase, the second half in first, if you follow...). More as things develop.