Putting a story aside

The story on which I'd been pouring out the words ground to a painful halt the other day (see previous entry). I set it aside, tired of the unproductive time, and immediately wrote over 1,500 words in two days on a new story. Which is good, because I'm productive again, but I really like that other story and want to finish it. I think I took my characters into the wrong place, and now I have to shepherd them back out and into another path of the maze -- one that will actually lead to a satisfying and not-trite ending. I was looking for a bang-crash-gee-whiz-lightning-and-thunder madcap rush to the end. I don't think that's right for that story. I'm getting that sort of thing out of my system with the new story, anyway, which has a divorce, economic crisis, job loss, weird psychic powers, and a mine cave-in, all in the first three pages. Yee-hah!