It doesn’t really matter what creative field you’re in; progress always feels great. It doesn’t matter how much progress you actually make (although solving a big problem is always better!) so long as you’re moving forward. I moved forward on Friday mostly by comparing what I’d already planned for book 2 against the cycle of the Hero’s Journey – a framework for making sure your stories have what they need to be complete and compelling.
There wasn’t anything wrong with what I’d done thus far. I had each beat I needed, and there wasn’t anything wrong with their order or the escalation of the tension/excitement. All the good things you want in a story I pretty much had. What was missing was a point to it all. Yes, there is always the ‘goal’ of keeping your characters alive, but without them making solid progress towards the main goal of the series (even if it is not slap-in-the-face obvious HOW important it may turn out to be) the book will be forever feel like an in-betweener – one of those bridging stories I hate so much. They need to achieve something concrete. You need some kind of closure.
Curing the ‘second book in a series’ syndrome can be fairly easy. Just make sure that your nemesis is back and worse than ever, throw a crisis of faith at a hero or two and top if off with a set-up for the third book that has readers watering at the mouth in anticipation of the poetic revenge that awaits them. And then look at what monster you’ve designed and ask yourself if it would be a good first novel. If it holds water (with a tweak or two) as a self-contained story that has a feeling of achievement and resolution at the end, you’re golden. If, without a book before it and after it, it feels a bit… aimless: start over. Or take the lazy way out and add a dragon. Everybody loves dragons.