Well, crap. Two nice things started my day, and then it came to a crashing, screeching, shards-of-plastic-on-the-pavement halt. First of all: I discovered that Word had been set to disregard my footnotes during word counts. I've been writing more than I thought! Isn't that nice? I am actually at over 5,000 words. At day's end today, I will provide a count that includes the day's footnotes, and also gives the corrected current total.

Second, I blazed out another 267 words (including footnotes) this morning and made it to the point where I was ready to revise and add all the pages and pages of material I'd written in my first attempt at a draft.

And this was where I hit the wall, because, upon re-reading those pages, I realized that they would have to be not so much revised as completely rewritten. Why? Because not only did I write that draft without establishing a bunch of needed background, but I also, apparently, wrote it without any structure, goal, or, y'know, point. I looked for a cogent thesis or several and a set of arguments and evidence backing it/them up, but all for naught.

Oh, ye gods above.

So I sat and thought and came up with a new plan for handling the material around which my previous draft had aimlessly drifted, and it is a good plan and all, but seriously, I am now faced with a whole new mountain to scale, just when I thought I'd made it to a nice, grassy meadow with a glass-clear lake and nodding blue flowers and wild ponies and all that idyllic shit. Argh.

I'm going to finish my lunch (black bean chili, cornbread, and some blanched kale with a crunchy sprinkle of kosher salt on top), then do my best to get started on this next task. What I want to do, however, is crawl up into the blogosphere and spend my remaining half hour at the library reading cute stories about cats and kids and vegan baking.

Damnation.