Hurdles

I've been slogging through some major self doubt. I'm not into the meat of my story yet, which will begin during Claire and MarLo's Halloween party, and so it's been nearly impossible for me to motivate myself to go through the necessary setup and development to get to the good stuff. But I do have some direction for the next leg of my journey owing to two weeks of hard thought on David's relationship with his mother and how his inability to emotionally connect with others must deeply injure her. I have a good friend who recently married and now has a 6-yr-old stepson who is not an affectionate little boy. He doesn't hug or snuggle or cuddle, and this makes it very hard for her to connect with him. I've been observing them closely and trying to get inside of Katharine's (David's mother's) head, and inside David's head when he contemplates her. It's ... tough. It's alien territory. I haven't been pushing myself at all, though, and I don't think this is a bad thing. The relationship that I'm contemplating, that I will be exploring in Chapter 3, is a delicate one, very fragile, the kind of relationship that if one party pushes too hard on the other, the whole superstructure collapses like a house of cards. So I've just been trying to be a quiet observer to see if I can get a feel for how the mother and son interact.

I am going to re-read my first two chapters and see if I can't get at least a very rough and horrible sketch of Chapter 3 done as I will have to polish it up on Friday night and Saturday in order to get it to my pact reader on Sunday night. And I won't be able to work on anything all week except for Wednesday. I'm going to the opera tomorrow night and Thursdays are always booked up with a political discussion group...at least until after the election, then I'm going to a once a month schedule which will be a huge relief. It will take the strain off of my budget and free up a huge chunk of time, and hopefully will help me stop smoking once and for all. I can go all week without a single cigarette but Thursday nights at the pub kill me.