I tripped over something else reading all the other comments in that thread over at Dean Smith's place. This is the comment I left when I thunk of it.

We're the ones who get to discover a million new ways to answer "now what happens?". There's no such thing as a wrong answer (well, except for the one that doesn't get written...)

Extended digression on the mechanics of plate tectonics (hello Michener...)

Where's the peyote? (Hunter S. Thompson)

Aunt Marge comes to visit... somebody let a troll loose in the dungeon (Rowling)

Let's throw in an extended gross-out revenge joke (King, The Body aka Stand By Me) or, maybe the evil monster is really a million year-old alien spider from Beyond (It) or what happens if someone sets off a bomb in the closet (The Stand)...

Too literary? Bring in the zombies. Not literary enough? What's the heroine think when she sees butterflies hovering over a field of flowers (or moonlight on an open ski run)? Maybe someone sends our hero a polite (and oddly worded...) email to visit their humble country home in a hidden part of Romania.

Know the ending? Write it backwards. Columbo enters saying, "Oh, there's just one more thing..." and now, ok how did he get there? And what did the crook do to try and throw him off?

It can be as outrageous as we can imagine, or as subtle. Play with symbolism, invent a language (on the fly no going off to write a dissertation), look for a portal to one hundred years in the past that someone left sitting in the third booth over in the diner and don't ask the waitress on the night shift, she's lost three customers this week...

It's all on the table, *at any time in the story*. The only thing we have to know is what keeps us hooked on the story. What brought our butts to this chair, and how do we keep it bouncing along 'til the end?