Was meeting a friend for a couple drinks before heading over to the movie theatre to watch on the big screen a video her husband had put together for her birthday, and I decided early on in the day I would get to the bar early and do some work on the novel for an hour and a half or so before she got there. I immediately returned to attacking the section I had tried to work on last night and had been slapped in the face by, but this time was successful in taming it, feeling in control of it, and making the necessary adjustments. If I can finally pull together everything I've written so far into one cohesive, forward-moving story line then I can get back to actual writing and not all this reading and re-reading and trying to figure things out, and I'm about 13,000 words up through it now, so I'm getting there.

     But it does further establish my belief that I have to get out of my home in order to make any successful progress... on pretty much any writing project. Plenty of this novel was written at home, I can't pretend it wasn't, but almost any time I make myself go out and concentrate solely on the manuscript for awhile, somewhere where I won't just stop in ten minutes and go do something else such as I can do at home, I make good progress. Whereas I'll make good progress at home maybe once a month. And for a good part of the summer not even that. I'm promising myself I'll begin going out to work on it at least twice a week (instead of the current one), but I hope to turn that into three or four times per week. I need this very heavy weight off my back. It's too personal, too emotional, I need out of it, for it to be over, so that I can move on. I think sometimes that it's keeping me tethered to the emotions that spawned it to begin with. And I've been burdened by those feelings for far too long. It's really, seriously time to move on, I know that as well as anyone, but there's this anchor keeping me tight to the sea floor...