One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book. Justin Cronin
The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists. Logan Pearsall Smith