Sustained Creativity

I'm world-building. I decided after my "Avoiding the Hard Stuff Never Works" post that I need to buckle down and answer all those questions about Madison's world that I've been avoiding. For instance:

• What are all the creatures in the world, good and bad?
• What is the larger organization that Madison works for like? What's it called? Who are the people running things? Do they have meetings? Conventions? Performance reviews of a magical kind?
• What's Mr. Pitt's/Niko's past and what motivates him? (Both are key secondary characters who are in book 2 and who will be in subsequent novels.)
• What are the things Madison is going to learn to do? How will I foreshadow that?
• What are the things that Madison has yet to learn (about the world, about her powers) that are common knowledge to everyone else?

These are big, far-reaching questions. My goal is to work on these for two hours every day this week and see where I'm at come Friday. Today, I've put in an hour and a half and have 4+ pages of notes and several ideas for future books. All in all, very successful.

Still, that last half hour looms. Sustained creativity--sustained world-building, rule-making, story-parameter-defining--is not for the faint of heart.