Writing Writing burnout (venting, but tips are welcome)

I've been trying to write something original pretty much ever since I first got a computer with Word on it back in elementary school. My first ever story was saved on a floppy disk and got to nearly 200 pages. No matter how many stories I tried though, nothing really "stuck" for me. I either just wrote myself into a corner or got bored with the subjects involved. So a few years ago I tried something new, a story that was a bit darker than my usual writing, and it finally stuck. The book I'm working on now is probably over 700 pages (I have a bunch of chapters saved to different files so I'm not sure of the exact count) which is more than I've ever written with something original. I have the world pretty well built, the lore is pretty much done, which makes writing characters and situations into this world not all that difficult. The only problem is that writing a darker story is actually... kind of depressing? Not depressing exactly, but there's certainly not a ton of happy moments either. I don't plan on changing it, but I just feel like my work flow has been kind of broken lately. It's almost become tedious, and pretty close to the end, with just this arc to finish, a couple of mini arcs, then the final arc to finish it off, I'm struggling to keep going and I feel like the quality has suffered.

I've been considering writing something a little more lighthearted to take a break, but I can't really come up with anything. I feel like darker stories have kind of become more my thing lately and I don't exactly mind continuing on, but I'm just having a lot of trouble getting past this mental hurdle, I guess. I know some people would probably suggest to take a break, but I've kind of been "taking a break" for a long time now so it's not really an option to keep doing that anymore.

 

I think just writing this has helped. I still haven't written much over the last few days, I had planned to write yesterday but I ended up not writing at all due to a migraine, but I think I'm probably going to go back and read through everything soon. I made a calendar, kind of important since the main religion in the story revolves around moon phases, so to make sure all of the timelines line up, I'm going to make notes on the calendar to make sure time is passing appropriately. Also at some point I'm thinking of cleaning up separate documents for notes, drafts, and the full version of the story. Hopefully a bit of organization helps too. I just want to feel like I'm getting something done.