For weeks I got exactly nowhere in my thinking--it all just seemed too hard, to f complex. I had run out of too many plotlines, and they were in danger of becoming snarled. I circled the problem again and again, beat my fists on it, knocked my head against it,...and then one day, when I was thinking of nothing much at all, the answer came to me. It arrived gift-wrapped, you should say--in a single bright flash. I ran home and jotted it down on paper, the only time I've done such a thing, because I was terrified of forgetting it.