I regularly offer my time and attention as sacrifices, but yesterday I offered tea and blood besides -- and immediately had a breakthrough that got nearly to the end of the story, all but the final lines. So maybe tea and blood is the way to go? Further experimentation is required.

I gave up origfic mostly because I ran out of conviction that I had original stories worth telling. And then it turned out that I vastly prefer the community around fanfic, anyway -- with origfic, publishing a story was dropping it into a black hole, but with fanfic, I'm sometimes so lucky as to have convos and make friends after. (And the pay was about the same for the two, frankly.)

First Sunday: the book has every step of the long division written out in its sample problems, but I used a calculator for my test cases, because I'm lazy. :-P

Now I'm learning a method for figuring out tide tables from scratch -- I'm probably going to have to pull up some tide tables and moon charts for the maritime places I've lived (and maybe for places the Hotspur hangs out) to check my work.