I haven't posted for ten years. Why? No, life did not get in the way. 

I lost heart in trying to reach out only to find I was typing to myself. But, over the last few years, I've lost friends, not necessarily from the big C-19 and become much more insular, spending more time at home but being unable to write. 

I'm in the middle of a novel. I know the end, but the path to that end has petered out: up against the briars of fear, stung by loss of confidence in my own ability to express how the story should proceed.

Yes, I know about creating atmosphere, using the five senses, dialogue, stylistic sentences and writing action scenes, but one of my characters, suspended between her country cottage in southern Ireland, and a need to be in Dublin, is going nowhere. I can't move her on. 

My other protagonist has moved on, in her quest, but she's reached a stage where I realise there's flaws in the way I've got her to her current place and, at the moment, can't figure out how to get her to carry on. It's as if she's in the proverbial middle of the Pacific, surrounded by sharks.

Eventually the two of them will meet but the journey for their getting together is a big foggy blank to me. I keep hoping that, like in other novels I've written, I'll dream the solution or, when I'm out for a long ramble, I'll start muttering the next conversation or action and can rush home and start typing. It hasn't happened even with the time for more and more longer walks due to C-19.

But we've been locked up or whatever the opposite of lockdown is so I'm writing this as a sort of automatic writing to see if it will break through and I can start writing again.