Circling the Wall

I've made some progress today on "Ly and the Ground Huggers" my current Belt Wars short story. But not much. Every time I've added a couple of paragraphs I've felt the need to go back to previous paragraphs and rewrite them because they didn't make sense any more. My Heroine, Ly, is still tip toeing around her second and most important crisis of the story without actually dropping into it. I just can't figure out a logical way for it all to happen. It feels as though I'm beating my head against a brick wall, then stopping to circle around and find somewhere fresh to beat my head. I've tried five different approaches so far, and none of them feel right. At least I've got a better idea where the story is going now. Maybe I should just head on and write the ending then work backwards.

My cousin from Britain, her husband and two small boys stayed with us the night before last. It was great to catch up, haven't seen her for a few years now. We missed them the last time they came out, for Christmas a couple of years ago.

We'd just left Kiama on Christmas morning when we got a flat tire. We'd been heading up to Sydney for a big family Christmas lunch thing. When I got the spare tire out, it turned out to have a nail in it. We couldn't get hold of roadside service (did I mention it was Christmas morning...) so I phoned a friend. The only friend I had who lived anywhere near us at the time. Fortunately he was able to come out and help. He had a portable compressor in his car. I couldn't re-inflate the flat tire, it was ruined, so I put some air into the spare and we limped back home for an improvised Christmas lunch of shepherds pie made from the only things we had in the fridge.

Anyway... the boys, well the eldest... wow! Precocious! A bundle of energy too, he made Basil seem sedate by comparison. Well, almost. He'd apparently never seen a Wii console before, but he instinctively knew this was a toy, and seemed to recognise the Wii game disks for what they where. He was determined to try and play with it whenever his parents left the lounge room. He didn't manage to get any of the disks into the Wii, but he did put one into the DVD drive in the computer we use as our TV. I have to wonder what he'll be like in a couple of years time, he's almost three now, he'll be unstoppable by the time he hits school!