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So, I have posted that the ‘E’ on my keyboard turned bad and I lost a couple of weeks of writing, first because that letter is so required in English and then by waiting for the repairs to be completed.

When I got the laptop back, I thought I had regained the forward momentum on this novel. The scene I was in the middle of when everything went off the rails I completed easily, setting up the next twist in the story.

And then my creative sailboat became becalmed, and I was stuck.

I knew that I had to switch to the antagonists of the tale. At this point in the narrative, there were two groups of them, not working collectively and with goals in opposition to both the protagonist and each other. However, their deficit of knowledge left me puzzled as to either group’s course of action. My fingers refused to write the next scene because my brain refused to tell them what it was.

Now, some writers deal with this by jumping ahead and writing some other scene in the story, and then they backfill the bits in between. I can’t do that.

One, since I am ‘pantsing’ this to the extreme, I don’t know what the future scenes are, much less what to write in them.

Two, I have never been able to do that writing out of order trick, even when I have a detailed outline that provides the future scenes. As a writer, I need to experience the scenes as they happen in the text. This greatly informs how I write and how the emotions of the scenes impact me and, hopefully, the reader.

Friday night, after I affixed my CPAP mask to my face and climbed into bed, the answer flashed into my head. The next morning it stayed with me, and I told part of it to my sweetie-wife as we did our 2-mile morning walk by the San Diego River.

Yesterday I began writing the scene, and the words flowed freely from my brain to the keyboard. Sometimes, all you need is a little time.