Got some work done on those three items I was talking about.

Looking back on the evening's writing, what I'm seeing is that the reason I didn't have a grip was that I was driving--or was in danger of driving--this whole part off base by working too hard to be clever. I got away from the purpose of each item, away from what needed to be done. Or, to be fair, I didn't know what needed to be done so I tried to impose a slant or meaning, which meant author intrusion, digressing into descriptions that I overloaded from my own authorly pov, and losing all track of everything except plot. I have to let the characters provide their own slant or meaning to each scene. If they don't provide it, then I need to figure out why. If I'm writing properly they should be doing most of the work for me, looks like.

So now it appears that one item is going to be a paragraph at most, buried in the rest of the ms--it's not important. The other two items seem to be moving aside a little, taken over by other things that are going on in scene. One of the items seems unimportant now, but I can see that it will be remembered by the characters; their slant on it will change, driven by what happens to them in the book. The last item I'm not sure about because I didn't get to it yet. We will see.