Too much to do here. I can't even think what order to do what in. I think I'll work on one of the w-f-h stories, at least for the rest of work time today--must tutor tonight. I've got overlapping deadlines, revisions coming back en masse, tutoring, end-of-school sh*t, relative in town, and suddenly today I found I'd put an important ARD (that's Texan for IEP meeting) on the wrong date and I had to leave four documents half-finished on my screen and run like hell to get there. (They were like, "Well, we can go ahead and have the meeting without you," and I was like, "Oh no, you will not!")

It looks like I'll pick up the swordfighting ms when I'm able to seriously get back into my own work, although I have no idea when that will be. Maybe never, is what it feels like at this point. But when I did work on it--not sure how long ago that was, a few days?--I cut the excess I'd become aware of but had been unable to do anything about. What I have now is a Chapter 1 that makes sense and has a point, and a Chapter 3 that makes sense and has a point. And then there's a Chapter 2 that I'm unsure about. I think it's one of those things I'm going to have to come to grips with, craftwise--if I was writing my normal way Chapter 2 probably wouldn't be there, at least not yet; I would probably skip straight to chapter three. So I guess one question to ask myself is whether I should pretend Chapter 2 isn't there and forge onward to see what develops, or whether I should try to figure out what to do with this transitional chapter, because there clearly must be some kind of bridge between events, and there clearly needs to be some kind of set-up for later.

I want to figure this out so much--how somebody like me can write a plotted novel--but there's just not enough time, and then where there is time I don't seem to make much progress because I don't know what I'm doing and the whole process is so unnatural for me.