Normally this time of year is known as “silly season”, a period in which the usual cycle of political stories is replaced by frothier news items.

Clearly events earlier this summer meant that didn’t happen, and although things presently seem a bit calmer, it won’t last for long; soon both the First and Prime Ministers will have to get back to the most important task at hand, sorting out Scotland and the UK’s future relationship with the EU.

Following the initial shock of Brexit, it looks like other EU Member States are keen to negotiate as quick and as clean a departure for the UK as possible. It has always been a semi-detached member of the Brussels club, they could reasonably argue, and therefore it makes little sense to drag things out.

So by the end of this year the Prime Minister could have an outline negotiating position. The key issue is retaining some sort of access to the Single Market and thus Freedom of Movement, without which thousands of businesses will find themselves in serious difficulty.

And at that point it seems to me the First Minister will have to articulate her post-Brexit “plan” much more clearly, either announcing the date of a second independence referendum, buying time before doing so, or cutting her losses and explaining why a ballot she described as “highly likely” on 24 June is not going to happen after all.

The second and third of these options won’t be easy because Nicola Sturgeon has created a general expectation that another vote is imminent; certainly the impatient wing of her party believe that to be the case. As ever, managing expectations within the SNP and broader Yes movement will be challenging. The Scottish Greens, for example, have already started agitating independently.

No decision has yet been reached on how to proceed, although there’s a degree of tension between two realisations: that public opinion appears not to have shifted significantly since Brexit, and the possibility that the political stars might never be this perfectly aligned again.

But in retrospect, it appears as if the First Minister and her advisers got a bit carried away in the weeks immediately following Brexit. First was the use of the pregnant phrase “highly likely” to describe a second independence referendum, not to mention the quixotic expectation that other EU Member States would negotiate directly with one part of the departing UK. Cosying up to Gibraltar, for example, was an odd move given the importance of securing support from indy-sceptic Spain.

The SNP, in other words, fell into the trap of believing its own hype, the simplistic notion that Scotland was a land of Europhiles so devoted to Erasmus and Freedom of Movement that Brexit would convert thousands of No voters to Yes, and the related belief that what the former Scottish Cabinet minister Alex Neil called “empathy and goodwill” from some quarters of the EU somehow altered the “political reality” that Scotland could only remain part of that Union by first leaving another. It doesn’t.

Ms Sturgeon’s Berlin visit last week was a case in point. Beyond a junior minister praising her as a “dedicated pro-European”, the First Minister got nothing beyond another photo opportunity. And tweeting since then, she’s often come across as more of a commentator than an active participant, referring to an academic article on the “reverse Greenland” option as “interesting” while directing her followers towards an analysis of the difference between “access” to and “membership” of the Single Market.

Now this is all very interesting, but hardly practical politics. Indeed, Mr Neil’s recent warning against Ms Sturgeon allowing herself to be “stampeded” into a “premature and unnecessarily risky” second referendum was significant in that it reflected the more cautious wing of the SNP. Yesterday the pro-independence commentator Iain Macwhirter also concluded that now was not the right time, instead floating 2021/22 as a more likely timescale.

The trouble with that is the First Minister has been quite clear that if another referendum is to take place then it would have to be within what she calls the “Brexit window”, i.e. the two-year period following the triggering of Article 50, most likely later this year. The choice, therefore, is more realistically between another ballot in the short or medium term, during either 2017 or 2018, assuming the UK formally leaves the EU in early 2019.

There are several other complications. First, it seems unlikely Ms Sturgeon wants next May’s local government elections to become dominated by the independence issue, for that would present a gift to the Scottish Conservatives, who after all are now predicating their political appeal on the basis of resisting another referendum (unlike Scottish Labour). While the SNP might finally take Glasgow from Labour, as last week’s by-election in North Ayrshire demonstrated, tactical voting by Unionists could deprive it of seats elsewhere.

The framing of another referendum is also fraught with difficulty. There is clearly unease among some Nationalists about presenting it as a choice between the UK and the EU, not least because around 400,000 Yessers backed Leave on 23 June. It’ll also be a bit hard to present independence as the “stable” option having just spent several months emphasising (with justification) how painful Brexit will be for Scotland. If that’s true of departing a looser alliance with limited fiscal transfers, what does that say about quitting a more integrated Union and the Barnett Formula?

And that’s where the most important weakness remains, the lack of a credible “offer” when it comes to an independent Scotland’s fiscal deficit, its currency and the prospect of a hard border with England. In his recent book “Determination”, the Yes activist Robin McAlpine called on the movement to be better prepared for a second referendum which, like Iain Macwhirter, he expected to take place early in the 2020s.

Realistically, however, the SNP now only has a year or so in which to clarify all this, although it seems likely the First Minister will commission work on this in the next few weeks, alongside the long-delayed summer (now autumn) “initiative” on independence. Ms Sturgeon realises that turning up at her autumn conference without tangible progress on these fronts wouldn’t be a good look.

At that gathering the party’s new deputy leader will also be unveiled. This, intriguingly, has ended up being a proxy discussion of the issues above, although it’s produced mixed messages in the process; candidates suggesting the independence proposition has to be more realistic while also maintaining that there are few (if any) potential downsides. Logically, of course, both can’t be true.

On Wednesday the First Minister will hold an Q&A with EU nationals, but while undeniably important it remains part of the ongoing phoney war. When Theresa May finally explains what Brexit looks towards the end of this year, Ms Sturgeon will be compelled to respond in less hypothetical terms.