Plotting and plodding

Today was a sluggish day and I wrote without a lot of energy. The story moved along a bit, but I had to repress my inner editor's urge to delete everything and start over. There'll be time enough for deleting when the writing's done. I foresee lots of deleting in my future.

The word for the day is recondite, meaning abstruse or little-known. It's not an unusual word, but I struggled to find a way to work it in without it seeming abstruse. 

Here are the last few paragraphs of the day. The word count is now 23,175.

            Then I remembered that I didn’t have a lot of friends in Blakesfield. Even though I had grown up there and knew everyone, that meant everyone knew me, too. And they all knew about my drinking and how I acted when I was drunk. I once heard a joke that there are three kinds of drunks: the jocose, the bellicose and the amorose. I was bellicose. I probably thought I was humorous and flirtatious, but I was just plain mean when I drank. I never hit LuNella, I swear to God. But I yelled at her and everybody else when I was under the influence, and I came home way too often with a black eye. For too many years, I was under the influence most of the time. We hadn’t been married long when I woke up and realized that we weren’t getting invited to parties. And no one was ever coming to visit. LuNella had her friends, but they never came to our house. As for my friends, the closest thing to friends were the guys at the bars in Cherokee Creek. That theme song about that bar in Boston about a place where everybody knows you name and they were always glad you came? Everybody knew my name, but after I had had a few drinks and began to pick fights, they wished I would leave.

            Billy Bob chose that moment to wake up and start crying. I headed back to the kids' room and forgot about any trip to the park, at least for now.