New Post: A bit of trouble with the Promise version

I hope I'm just doing some little thing wrong, but in the following code I call writeNew from the .done clause of a write to a different list (which always works), and although execution gets to that secondary function, the SPServices operation doesn't happen. If I call that writeNew function before the first write operation, it works fine.

Hoping you can see something obvious:

        $(document).ready(function() {  
//writeNew("Happy", "Birthday"); //works fine
...
                vpairTo.push($().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser({fieldName: 'Email'}));
...
                var newPromise = $().SPServices({
                    operation: "UpdateListItems",
                    batchCmd: "New",
                    listName: "{ED0039D0-26F7-49A9-8EA3-C7168D1756E0}", 
                    valuepairs: vpairs
                }); // works fine
                newPromise.done(function() {
...
                    writeNew(strID, userAgain); //gets to writeNew but doesn't write
                });
                newPromise.fail(function() {
                    alert("failed: newPromise for " + vpairTo);
                });
...
        });
    
    function writeNew(strID, userAgain) {
alert("We're in writeNew with " + strID + ", " + userAgain);
        var newlyPromise = $().SPServices({
            operation: "UpdateListItems",
            batchCmd: "New",
            listName: "{4EA9668B-DCF5-4B0E-B40C-F0852A2A29AF}", //ResponseByLesson, Michael
            valuepairs: [["Title",strID],["Responder",userAgain]]
        });
        newlyPromise.done(function() {
            alert("Happy to see you!");
        });
        newlyPromise.fail(function() {
            alert("Boo hoo!");
        });
    }
...