The Yoyo Writer

I've spent most of today working on one of my fictional works. And when I say 'working', what I actually mean is 'staring blankly at the screen waiting for inspiration to strike'. So I thought I might as well do a blog post on writing (it is, after all, one of the main reasons I created the blog in the first place).
To begin with, I would like to point out that I will not post exerpts from my novels in this blog. Well, I MAY occasionally post a single line or sentence (if I feel like showing it off, or if I feel that it needs critiquing), but you won't be seeing any full chapters. While I would like to share more of my work publicly, this runs the risk of impacting any future copyright assertions I may have if/when I get something published. Generally, the only people who see my work in progress are family and friends (particularly those I went to TAFE and did the Writing and Editing Diploma with. As an aside, I'd like to thank anyone who has workshopped/will workshop my writing :D).
Those of you who know me are aware that I have several vague, unfinished story ideas bouncing around in my head, many of which will probably never see the light of day. However, there are two projects that I am deeply engaged with, and I tend to bounce back and forth between them like a yoyo. The first is Exile, an epic/dark fantasy trilogy I began in early 2005 and the second is Dark and Silent Waters, a dark fantasy tale that started early this year as a short story idea, and then exploded into a novella.
For almost three years while in the Writing and Editing course at TAFE, I had been plodding away with Exile, throwing together a very vague outline of the trilogy as a whole and writing the first seven chapters of the first novel. But I never felt like I was making a lot of progress with it, perhaps because the sheer scope of the project was so massive I just couldn't visualise it ever being completed. In a way, it was starting to depress me. So when the idea for Dark and Silent Waters came along (inspired by a song I found while randomly browsing music on YouTube), I seized the distraction from Exile with both hands. More than that, I beat it half to death with a stick and shoved it into a cage so it couldn't get away. And then I sat on the cage.
Though I've only worked on Dark and Silent Waters for a few months, I already feel that I've made more progress with it than I ever made with Exile. Not only have I written the prologue and the epilogue (I find it difficult to write in chronological order, I have to write scenes as they appear in my mind) and chapter 1, I have also managed to write a complete outline, from beginning to end, of the whole story. This, combined with the fact that it is a smaller project than Exile, makes it seem more achievable. I'm hoping that once I finish this novella, I will have the confidence and experience necessary to bounce back to Exile once more, and take on the trilogy in a way that will do it more justice. Ideally, I would like to have a completed first draft of Dark and Silent Waters by the end of this year (though whether I can actually pull it off remains to be seen).