Yup. Still stuck.

Writer's block is a bitch. Have spent the day resolutely avoiding constructive thought, rather like Harriet Vane in Have His Carcase:

Harriet continually found herself putting her work aside--"to clear" (as though it were coffee). Novelists who have struck a snag in the working-out of the plot are rather given to handing the problem over in this way to the clarifying action of the sub-conscious. Unhappily, Harriet's sub-conscious had other coffee to clear and refused quite definitely to deal with the matter of the town-clock. Under such circumstances it is admittedly useless to ask the conscious to take any further steps. When she ought to have been writing, Harriet would sit comfortably in an armchair, reading ...

I don't know what my sub-conscious's "other coffee" is, but it's certainly not interested in my plot problems. *sigh* I keep telling myself this is a lingering aftereffect of the flu, and it will get better soon. I really hope I'm right about that, because the bottom of a mineshaft at midnight has nothing on my mood after a week of being blocked.

The Baskerville Hounds are laughing at me. I just know it.

---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1960. p. 290.

Eureka!

Okay, I'm not going to run naked through the streets like Archimedes, but I did get myself provisionally unstuck--only about a page and a half written, but I know where I'm going tomorrow, and that really makes a tremendous difference. It's like being on a Grail Quest. You know you're never going to catch the Grail, but as long as you can follow it, you know you're doing okay.

So now I'll finally quit bitching about my writer's block.

At least for a while.