"Back to the meat grinder!"

The above is a favorite paraphrase from the youngest of my older brothers.

[It's from a 1959 war movie called "Pork Chop Hill" and the actual quote is said by a Chinese propagandist telling the American soldiers, "Welcome to the meat grinder!"]  

Now that all my assignments are done, for a few days, I found myself adrift... Ideas were bombarding me left and right, and I couldn't make heads or tails what to do with them. I was so confused. So far off the high of creating so many things, doing so much research and compiling things together that I couldn't focus or stand the creative process still taking its time with me.

Now, I am not saying that the Muses left me high and dry. The opposite! They continued to stay and whisper to me. The ideas came in dreams, in bursts and in gallons of fuel-edged visions I couldn't keep up with. Stories that I had not thought about in weeks or months, couldn't remember, was coming up with answers and solutions to some of the more difficult subplots and weirds ideas I would never, in a million years, have considered.

So that I don't bore you with the plethora (I love this word) of examples, I will say that the novel draft had not been left behind because of this. Moreso, there have been subplots I really did not want to delve into because they were just so hard to solve. But now, I have the impetus (a word from my grandma, RIP) to tackle the task of writing those scenes.

For practice in the coming months of further working on the story, I'm working on the various female voices, especially the main secondary characters. I don't want them all to sound the same, of course, and each is crucial to my main male character.

I put the name of the character on top of the page, and then I do two paragraphs: one when she is talking about herself, the other when she talks about 'Slash' Castellano.
It's a start, but this may unearth gold for future chapters that will help the body of the story.