Dunno if you skipped anything, but on the topic of writing: do you ever get to points where the setting and characters you work on feel stale to you? Like, in food terms, it's rice left you boiled in the rice cooker, accidentally left it on "warm" for a week, and now it's turned petrified and inedible?

I started with the term "steampunk" then stopped at the step of actually finding a snowy European place to base everything on. Actual research is a little intimidating because I'm not sure where to start. I figured maybe I'd pick a country with a lot of umlauts in their language...?