Dispatches # 15: Oh, for a muse of fire – that would transcend this floundering amid divergent paths

Life would be so much easier if I had the sort of mind that came up with a neat, orderly outline and just wrote the damned thing. “Out of cheese error … redo from start.” Just a thought. This thing wants to be two separate stories, is its problem. This is usual, but usually they grow into one another. These are reluctant to merge. Conjoined twins (conjoined souls?) struggling to pull away from each other, in between throttling one another. Gah. Loud Jethro Tull will help. Perhaps.

New file, so that any radical tinkering does not lose what went before, in case the New Idea about H. and A. turns out not to be the revelation and solution I currently, in my tea-fueled and river-viewing optimism, think it should be. The great unity, the crossing point of the two plots, where they twine together like chromosomes trading genes …

Back to work.

“Go spin, you jade, go spin.”

* Long gone are the days of common literary culture, when one could toss off references and assume a shared familiarity with them on the part of one’s readers or auditors. The two eminent authors quoted herein are, of course, Sir Terry Pratchett and Sir Walter Scott.