Today is the miracle day that I’ve been waiting for: reintroduction! Except that I feel like crap, so reintroduction is sort of pointless. I wouldn’t be able to tell whether I was reacting to the food or whether I was still in the remarkably slow recovery stage of this cold. C keeps telling me I should go to a doctor, but I am fatalistic about doctors’ abilities to help one with cold/flu symptoms. I’ll get better eventually, just in time to start reintroducing foods and seeing what I react to by what makes me feel lousy. Hmm… that does sound bad when put that way, doesn’t it?

I’ve been having a terrible time trying to write. I decided yesterday that it wasn’t writer’s block so much as profound writer’s self-loathing. I just seem to hate everything that I write. It’s all wrong, wrong, wrong. But I told a friend yesterday my entire plot for A Precarious Balance and it sounds so fun. The complications and the twists and the cities, the emotional conflicts, the characters and relationships… I really like it. In my head. On screen, no, not so much. “One word after another”–the only writing strategy that really works for me–has turned into lot of spinning wheels and deleting drafts. It reminds me of writing A Gift of Time. I don’t know whether that means I should stick with it, the way I did for the interminable 18 months spent writing Time, or leave it for now and do something else. For the moment, at least, I’m going the stick-with-it route. And I think I will now open up the file and stare at it some more. I can tell myself that I’ve already written 300 words and that all I need to do is keep my fingers moving. Maybe it’ll work.