Finished plotting.

I mean, I diagrammed a dozen chapters.  I was thinking about this for a week or so, especially yesterday, but today I felt like taking a stab at it and it just rolled out.

Not only that, but I've come up with a goodly part of the third book.  At least the premise and the themes.  (I've been starting to set up the third book over the last few written chapters, when I realized it was going to happen.)

My general rule of thumb is that I will double the number of chapters in actually writing them, so I've got about 24 chapters to go.  Which will make the book about 70K words, or right in my comfort zone.

I used to think I enjoyed discovering the plot in the actual writing -- and I did -- but it also led me into traps, or became too predictable (writing the plot in advance means I can tweak it), or I had to go back a lot and fix it. 

But I think I had a couple of instances where I plotted the book and then didn't write them, so I came to the wrong conclusion.  I think that might still be true if you do the whole book that way, but if you start off fresh and then do some course corrections along the way, at some point it becomes necessary and beneficial to try to work out the rest of the plot.  In this case, about 65% of the way in.  By then, you've so into the book that knowing the ending won't demotivate you.

I still get a creative charge in seeing HOW the plot plays out, all the surprising connections and details.

The end book is never the same as the outline, but the outline gets you to the end of the book.