Years ago one of my offspring, when ever so young, used the word "gutch" for stuck.
Well, gutch has stuck for me ever since. I like the word a lot, which is a good job because when I write I frequently get gutch. The trick, therefore, is to get to being ungutch. In a time-pressured environment like Nano there is a need to get ungutch as fast as possible (though I have already reached the target, so yay for me) and press on.
Anyway, the plot of Gemstone had hit a snag and I needed to move it forward.
As so often I left writing alone and went and did something else. This might be washing up, walking the dog, staring at the ceiling (not to be underestimated as a creative stimulus) and in the midst of one of these it struck me.
I had already written the basis of a solution, but just hadn't seen it before. I had put what was, essentially, padding into part of the Gemstone story a day before. It was, in the nature of rolling the plot along, almost a throwaway line. Definitely the sort of thing that could easily be chopped out if the final thing appeared too long, though it is unlikely that trimming one line would make much difference.
So, that one bit of padding -- the unnecessary insertion of words and sentences that makes the final word count look great in Nano -- provided me with the answer. I ran back to the keyboard and typed away joyfully at the solution. I was ungutch!
Of course, the condition of getting stuck once more no doubt awaits further down the line. Just because I have overcome one small barrier doesn't mean I have leapt over them all.
Until the next gutch, onwards and upwards!
PS: One of my authoring 'tricks' is to introduce characters that may or may not be useful later in the tale, so in a way the padding I had inserted could be considered just a variation on a theme. No doubt from now on I will value all my padding, like stray characters, as potentially useful.
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