You are allowed one turn, every now and then, to refill the well, replenish the springs, or whatever metaphor you like for giving your creativity a chance to reload. Honestly. I've checked the rulebook, and it's in there.

My impression of Last Merge is that it is a rather large event, full of lots of viewpoints and daring-do. That may be one of the problems, because it might be that you haven't actually found the story within the event that you wish to tell.

You feel blocked, because there are other stories in line that sort of depend on having Last Merge already gone.

I'd like to point you at some of the 1634 stories, that had to tell their own story without giving away the events of Baltic War. etc. In one of them, Rita arrives in Rome and the others say "you have to tell us the details of your escape" but those details are not discussed.

If you could do something similar, you could acknowledge that events happened, but leave the details of the events nebulous (until later, when presumably you figure out how to tell those tales.)

I mean, who woulda known that there was a running fight with the remains of the Black Island Gang running through the middle of the merge, and different characters were cooperating as well as fighting and ....

another example: Larry Niven had a long period he called the "Man-Kzin Wars" which he left untold in his Known Space stories. He said at a convention one time "I don't do War stories". At a later time, he allowed other authors to tell stories set in those wars, and the series of anthologies is up to about 20 books now - and Larry has even managed to write his kind of story in the middle too.

So really, What do you need to tell about the Last Merge? Could you do it piecemeal by flashback from other stories? It's chaotic enough that any one person might not know it all? I mean, if you leave it up to Nil, they're all goats anyway....

Darqref

By pulling out Ebsa and Ra'd's side of the battle out of _Last Merge_ it's become much more manageable. It'll mostly be Xen's (started but nowhere near finished)and Eldon's (almost pared down to what matters) parts.

I don't like publishing ahead of crucial stories, because it constrains what I can do with the crucial one.

I do like writing ahead, because I can see things I need to not render impossible in the earlier story.

Just as a for instance, what could be more obvious than a romance between Paer and Ra'd? Except that by the time I was writing _Olympian_ I was thinking about two other kids the same age and Nighthawk and Ra'd would be such an excellent romance . . . ought to throw them all into college together . . . Yeah, Ebsa too . . . (toss mention of him considering DS into Small Family Wedding before it gets published) and so in Olympian, no sparks or chemistry.

My writing style is pretty chaotic, and I often feel like I'm not writing enough, but when I look back, I've got a bloody lot of titles on Amazon, so I guess it's working all right.