The suck. Oh, the suck. Son is mostly over his new tooth, and that is something. (Yay sleep.) But this part of my chapter continues to be slow going. I go wandering into the forest every day, and if I'm not careful, I'm liable to get lost. I have to keep remembering just where it is I am trying to get to, or I stop and stare at all the local points of interest, instead.

I am not obsessively rewriting this section over and over again. (Not yet, anyway!) But I do keep moving bits around, roughing out new paragraphs in the middle of a page that I had thought was finished, and pouring out endless notes onto the page about where to go next, no here, no there, no, what about that neat little thing over yonder?

So I am writing a lot and working hard, but it is hard to get a word count. I guess, for the past two days, my polished word count total is a rather unimpressive 354--and one large chunk of that has gone adrift. That's right: I have an absolutely solid, necessary paragraph that I cannot for the life of me figure out where to put.

Sigh.

Hard to gauge today's work, seeing as I yanked out a bunch of stuff, then wrote new stuff, then pasted some of the old stuff back in. Overall my total word count increased only by 49 words, but I wrote 327 new words. Wait...73 of those I salvaged from my old draft, so does that mean I wrote only 254 words? Ugh, this accounting is getting complicated. And what about the extra 50 or so words I have in notes for finishing my current paragraph?

Never mind. Let's just say that the day went OK, and that I am starting to feel more certain of what I want to say in this very difficult section and how I want to say it.

For now.

But, oh, if I get into the same cycle of writing and rewriting as in my previous draft, someone will hit me with a tranquilizer dart and drag my slack body away from my keyboard, right? Please?

PS: I estimate I will need another seven working days to finish this section of my chapter and move on to some less agonizing material. Let the countdown begin!

PPS: Yesterday? Zero words. Felt like crap. Got nothing done.

PPPS: Except baking a very tasty banana cake! So, hey, there's that.

Where have I been? Saturday I decided to work from home, as per the usual, but I got nothing done beyond looking over my work and jotting down a few notes. I remember now why I had such a hard time on my first draft: it deals with some of the most difficult material of the chapter. And now I am up against it again, struggling both to get a good grasp on it and to not be overcome by my fears that I cannot do it justice.

Sunday my husband and son went out for several hours with my sister-in-law, and I spent up all the time in cleaning. I had planned to clean a little and bake a little and write a little, but the cleaning swamped everything. Our apartment had become quite cluttered and dirty over the winter; it is hard to do a really good cleaning if my son is underfoot, and it has been too cold for my husband to take the child out to the park for a few hours. So I took the chance while I had it and gave the place a good shake down. And let's face it: my son is a toddler, my husband is a packrat, and I am an anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive neat freak. When I settle down to a really thorough cleaning, it takes a looooooong time. There was no writing. But the apartment is much more pleasant now.

Yesterday I had to stay home, as the babysitter was out of the country. Honestly, it was a delight to be able to stay home and play with my son all day. We had some great romps, and then he crashed for his nap--and then, rather than write, I curled up with a book. I figured I deserved it after all my work on Sunday, and I figured I'd be up and out early on Tuesday (today). What I did not figure on was a new molar growing in in my son's mouth, poor pea.

Last night he woke about once every 60 or 90 minutes--well, I say "woke" but really, he only became sort of half awake, writhing around and mewling in pain, his hair all damp with sweat. I should have got up and got him some painkillers, but I was so tired myself I just kept rolling over and nursing him some more, which he finds the nicest treatment for teething, in any case. By morning I was totally exhausted and my back was stiff and sore from all the time I'd spent nursing in a side-lie position.

For the one I've been drinking coffee, and for the other my husband gave me a good backrub, but I am still so uncomfortable I just cannot face carrying my heavy backpack out to the library to work. I'm out of Tylenol, but then, it wouldn't help much with this sort of muscle pain, anyway. I can't take NSAIDs, due to allergy concerns, and I can't have steroid, either, while I'm still breastfeeding. Our campus health center does employ a massage therapist, though, and maybe I will see if I can get a session or two, if my back isn't better tomorrow. For the meanwhile, I am trying to rest and write a little from home. And tonight I will dose the child up with painkillers prophylactically, before he goes to bed.

I spent a little time lying down, and on the up side, I had some good ideas about dealing with the next section of this chapter. Now I just need to wake up a little more and maybe stretch out some, and then I will see if I can't write at least 250 words. Time to get back to it!

As expected, yesterday stank: 162 words in the draft proper, and 99% of those a lengthy quote. However, I did write a bunch of notes and plans for how to proceed through the next, well, however many pages. And today I got grimly back up on the mule and wrote 415 words. It's moving, it's coming. Another day or so and my joy in my project will come back, too, but for now I am still suffering a sense of defeat over my lost pages. Really, I'm going to feel much better once I let the old draft just go and stop searching through the wreck for salvage. When I reread those pages, I am infected with something of the miserable, airless coasting of the original, and the fear seizes me that I will not be able to do any better my later drafts. I've got to stop rereading--heck, if for no other reason than because crap like that doesn't deserve a long mourning! Onward.

I'm having a bitch of a time today. Partly, I'm still reeling from yesterday's sucker-punch. I mean, seriously? Several thousand words down the shitter? I am Not Happy.

My other trouble is exhaustion, pure and simple. Last night the son woke me a bit after midnight, with ear pain. Now, I've taken him to the ped, and been sent home again with the diagnosis of "nope, nothing's wrong." And to be fair, he has no fever, no runny nose, mostly no symptoms at all. But he tugs and tugs and scratches and twists his poor right ear, and sometimes he is in obvious pain when he tries to sleep on it. I'm going to have to try the ped again, I think, but I expect the same reaction. Our ped is very chill, very wait-and-see, and mostly I like that, but dude something really and truly is wrong when my kid is crying from pain or scratching his ear open, and hey, why don't you take a more thorough look and figure out what it is, okay?

Anyway.

I gave son some tylenol drops, then cuddled him on the couch in front of a kid video, until the pain killer could take effect and leave him able to lie down comfortably again. Which was all well and good, except I just never seem to learn this cardinal rule of nighttime parenting: don't take them out of their bed, don't interact excessively with them, and for heaven's sake, don't let them watch any TV! Of course (of course!!!) once the little one was feeling a bit better, he wanted nothing to do with going back to bed. Mom was up, he was up--it must be time to be up! There commenced, until sometime after 3am, when he finally dropped back off again, an escalating series of battles between son and parents. Son wanted to run around the apartment, bounce on the bed, sing songs, and climb all over Mom. Parents wanted to sleep. Oh, sweet, precious sleep. Toddler had to be shown to his tantrum spot multiple times, and Mom had to storm out of the bedroom and stomp up and down the hall counting to ten at least once. By 2:30am, parents were sniping at each other (score 100 points for toddler!) Eventually, son did pass out, although Mom had to relax her "just lie down and go to sleep, already" policy a little and stroke his back to achieve this end.

I slept in till 8am, and son and husband till nearly 9am. The rest of the morning mainly involved sitting around, drinking tea in a vain attempt to wake up (not to mention feeling bloated, which is what happens when a mostly-vegan indulges in a giant cheese plate for dinner the previous night--my cheese goddess sister-in-law's treat, and my lands, was it ever good). Then I decided to do the cooking early (some banana-date bread and a pasta-and-TVP dish for dinner that came out quite well--and I'm not a big TVP lover), before heading to the library. Except there was still the tiredness, and did I mention it is fricking cold outside? No? Hey, it's seriously fricking COLD outside.

So I have set up shop in the kitchen. (Yes, the kitchen. That's where I write when I write at home. Don't judge me. My other major job in life is to cook for my family, so the kitchen is my natural workstation.) Only...I'm not getting much done. Because of the discouragement over tossing my first draft, and because of the unshakable tiredness. And now we are back to where we came in.

OK, this post is really just a time-waster, let's be honest. I will now drag myself back to work by the scruff of my own neck. But don't look for a good word count today. Just sayin'.

Today's word count: 343. The total thus far in my draft: 5,181. Not bad. I wish I had accurate stats for the past week, though. I'm still trying to figure out how much I write in a day.

I guess I'll know in another week or so.

Now off to set the bread dough for its second rising, fix myself a cup of tea, and make some phone calls.

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.