On bad habits, and the handling of such

So I've recently been locked in an intense staring contest with the same foe that has haunted me throughout my entire life when it comes to writing:
an absolute lack of planning.

I have a very bad habit of starting stories with only random segments in mind, and no real plan for stringing them together in a cohesive fashion. Those segments, when I get to them, I generally feel are fairly good, but the content in between, with some exceptions, I usually find fairly lacking. Honestly, I find it incredibly frustrating.

Anyway, since wallowing won't fix this problem, I've decided to do something about it. I've had a pony fic rolling around in my head for months now that I've avoided putting to paper simply because damn it, I'm going to plan this one! I've been working it out on paper first, and it's already actually looking like a solid, unified arc.

Will it be fairly long? Probably. Most of my ideas seem to involve constructing a sub-setting that I can play within, and this doesn't look to be different from that. My Little Black Ops is intended to have various stealth-based missions that the CMC goes on, and Planar Parallax is supposed to have second-person adventures. The problem is, as much as I love the stuff I'm setting up there, I haven't really planned much of it. This is why Black Ops hasn't been updated in months, and it's why it'll likely be a good while before I get around to doing more Parallax.

I try to learn from my mistakes though. What I'm working on now, I'm also planning out the sub-stories that will be happening and how they'll tie in to the overall arc. As always I've got some ideas for cool individual scenes, but now I'm finally having some good plans for how to string it all together.

It'll be a while before I put the new story out for everyone to see, so I'll just say this. If you're a fan of themes found in the original Star Trek and Doctor Who, you might be a fan of what I'm working on next.