Inches Forward on the Book, But Without the Grace of the Graceful Inchworm

I worked on a section that I was not feeling connected to at all. Ground away at it for awhile, then moved on to the pile of snippets on various snippets of paper I'd collected. As I started writing them down in one notebook, I got hugely panicked and overwhelmed. This is a regular occurrence with this project. It usually involves crying and frustration and stomping around the house in a dither. I'm not sure exactly what a dither is, but I'm sure that's what I've been stomping in. Today, as I was feeling the weight of a project that just might be too big and too involved for me, Scott started throwing out another idea for my approach, and my voice completely disappeared. It was actually pretty amazing. My vocal cords froze and I could not even whisper. I've been getting like this for a couple years. My voice shuts down in extreme panic, but never like this. One of the things freaking me out was the idea that I would not finish at least the first draft of this book THIS summer. It's like my whole body rejected that possibility, and registered its vote via my vocal cords. So, no matter how confusing this 50,000-piece jigsaw puzzle becomes, I have to put the next piece on the card table and stare at it until it shows me where it's supposed to go.