Dog help me, it's another distraction

I have a title: "A suitable lover." I have the first chapter: the scene that came to me this weekend in which Sonny lays out his theory that his role in life is to be the unsuitable lover who leads a person to discover their suitable lover, plus another scene where Sonny offers to date Pete in order to magically summon the suitable lover for Pete, and Pete turns him down because he's pretty sure that would ruin their friendship. And I know how it ultimately works out and it's probably not how you think it would, and I'm not going to tell you any more than this: think of a comic opera.

I also have a series of chapter titles, which I am not satisfied with but I'm not working on this right now, it's attacking me in dark corners and in the car while I'm driving and stuff. The chapter titles are of the form: "The timid lover loses to the brave" and "The overbearing lover loses to the gentle" and "The frivolous lover loses to the serious" and "The dishonest lover loses to the sincere" and so on. What I refuse to figure out right now is the proportion of flashback to forward story, and the form of flashback -- that is, do the flashback bits get told in third person, or in first, and in any case are they seen through Sonny or Pete or do they alternate? And, it's a silly story, but is it a silly story that pretends it's angsty, or one that goes for the slapstick? Because right now it's wildly careening between the two.

I do know that Pete says that Sonny should stop adopting a new personality for each new boyfriend and just be his real self and Sonny says that would be nice if he had a real self to be. But I don't know whether that happens in the story: that would depend on whether the story is pretending to be angsty or not.


And yes, "thousand lemons" is the tag for all of the following: short-shorts, attack stories, and distraction writing.

A Nicoll moment

Okay, I shouldn't even have been eating the salami. I definitely shouldn't have gone for that last slice. I certainly should not have been cutting towards my thumb while reading over a bit for the writing group.

I used up three doses of the rusty stop-bleeding powder and I have been applying pressure but it's been half an hour and when I peek at it an awful lot of blood still flows. I'm a little lightheaded, so I'm damned well not going to drive myself one-handed to get stitches. So I'm sitting here typing one-handed till Frank gets home from walking the dog or whatever he's doing, or Ted gets home from work, whichever comes first.

I figure it's not a Nicoll moment without a little stoicism and self-deprecatory humor, and preferably a bit of hysterical detail. Before the blood started up, I saw this trench in my thumb and thought "oh, that's going to make it hard to take a bath." The knife is Haenckels seven-dollar "twin grip ice hardened" paring knife with the green plastic handle (which means it has the acute blade: the yellow handle is the straight blade and the blue is the curved blade, excellent for peeling celery root). It was not as sharp as usual because I am a lazy toad.

Frank is here and he concurs that I need stitches. Oh well, I was supposed to drop by at the doctor's office today anyway.