Blame & Wonder

Good afternoon, gentle readers.
I haven't gotten much writing done lately.
Not for lack of trying; I've been sitting down at the keyboard every night for the last week, banging away, producing nothing worthwhile.
I think the last piece I was happy with was a submission to 365tomorrows, and that one had been haunting my head for the better part of a month.
I'm still working on the sequel to Dawnwind: Last Man Standing, which I have privately started referring to as That Bloody Book.  At the rate I'm working on it, however, George R.R. Martin will have finished his entire Song of Fire and Ice and probably edited a couple more Wildcard novels before I finish this thing.
It doesn't help that I'm distracted, sort of, by other things: the house, the job, life in general. But trying to blame my lack of productivity on all that just makes me feel lazy.
I suppose I could blame Youtube and Hulu for some of it.  I was watching Fallout: Nuka Break and Bus Pirates on YouTube this week and binge-watched every episode of Deadbeat on Hulu last night.
But if I'm going to do that I might as well blame David Weber and Rachel Aaron for writing such engaging characters as Honor Harrington and Eli Montpress.
The fact of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, that I could blame a lot of things: the weather, the birds that insist on singing outside my window, movies I have seen, cakes I have eaten.
But those aren't reasons, they're just excuses.
And there comes a point where you have to stop making excuses and admit the hard truth: I'd rather be writing something else.
That Bloody Book is just no fun to write. 
It has become a kind of duty to me, something I HAVE TO FINISH.
Writing it is less a creative endeavor and more of an endurance contest.
Can I finish it before I snap and run naked down the street screaming at the top of my lungs?
Well, okay, that probably won't happen.
But sometimes that's what it feels like it's becoming.
So is it any wonder I get distracted by other stories? I've got an unfinished fantasy in the wings and, percolating somewhere in the back of my head, a sequel to The Marvelous Land of Ap.  There's a supervillain story slowly taking shape in small notes and character descriptions.
But the funny thing is That Bloody Book could be fun again. Last weekend, on a lark, I started writing a short story set in the same universe with the same characters and the words just poured out like milk and honey.  It was wondrous.
I just have to find that same sense of wonder with the current story.
So, what's next?
The hunt for wonder.