Roadblock

Well, I guess it's not as clear sailing through the rest of this draft as I thought. I've hit a section with some pretty significant structural problems that I had managed to overlook before. It's the kind of thing that in the past would stump me for a couple days then have me depressed for a couple days before I buckled down and figured out a solution, but I'm going to try and skip the first couple steps this time.

So much of this work is about psyching yourself out so you're in the mental and emotional state to keep going. For me, the timing of the pulses of intellectual energy is really important. I feel like I need to write first thing in the morning, and I feel like composing and figuring things out are two different aspects of writing that take up a lot of intellectual energy. So I've learned from experience to do my best to do the "figuring things out" work the day before so it doesn't rob me of my first pulse of intellectual energy in the morning.

So that's kind of my task this afternoon. This morning is a wash, but I can do a lot of the brainstorming and puzzling out and critical activity that's necessary for the rest of the day so that I'll have a good solution to work on tomorrow morning.