Why did I want to be a writer, anyway?

This has been one of -those- days in the wonderful world of novel writing. Every now and then one can see a couple of possible ways for the story to go. Invariably, just as dropped toast always seems to hit the floor butter side down, one writes out the wrong one first.

And that's just what I did, write out four full pages of the wrong way.

Foomph. What happens then, of course, is one sinks into despair, the Mr. Earbrass-ian "dreadful dreadful dreadful" stage. After years of this, I know that it ain't necessarily so, that the book probably (hopefully) isn't dreadful, and I'm just tired at the moment. But one always wonders if maybe this is the time that the book falls completely apart after leading one on for a couple of hundred pages.