Brick walls and beyond

So there I was, tapping merrily on the keys as I worked my way through a scene I was adding to the novel. Suddenly my fingers stopped as I realized that what I was adding was going to negate a particular character's motivations for...well, for pretty much the rest of the novel. Yikes.

That had all the stopping power of a brick wall. I moped around for a couple of days, trying to bash some kind of fix into shape, not even daring to open the file. It seemed hopeless unless I backtracked and took out a lot of stuff I'd added and really liked.

Then my good friend Nancy came over for coffee, and over mugs of that brain-powering liquid and a plateful of chocolate chip cookies, she listened to my lament and showed me that--it wasn't really as bad as I'd thought. It could still work. We hashed it out a bit and now I think I'm back on track.

As blocks go, it was a pretty brief and easily remedied one. But at this fragile stage of my back-to-writing initiative, it was still scary.