Well, I seem to have recovered at last

Dancing not at folk dance class but at the end-of-the-year celebration for a series of classes for preschool teachers, and I could really really do it.  It was nice.

Also, I have the opening to the sequel to the Drummer Boy, and many of the things that are in the story, but not the plottyplotplot.  Of course, it is Ludmilla's story, and it might be more interesting than Yanek's if it only had a plot.  Ludmilla's a more attractive person than Yanek.  She's one, a mystic, except that two, she's not because she's a materialist, and three, she's practically a Lorax, only instead of being a ball of fuzz who makes panicked prophecies, she's a calm scientist who knows things beyond what she knows.  When she knows stuff about situations that she doesn't have the supporting information for, she considers it to be a hypothesis, not a vision, and while she's not afraid of dropping bombs into conversations with matter-of-fact confidence, she won't commit to them as facts until she's gotten the data.

So I know some other things about her character, and her appearance (she's not as little as Yanek).  I also know that she gets her parents to agree to send her to University on the grounds that Yanek will be there to be a chaperone (sexist times, yes).  And I know that when Yanek disappears she comes up with another plan.  I know that despite her determination to put off marriage as long as possible -- forever if possible -- she ends up marrying, and I know why, and I know how that happens, and I know that she has at least one child,  And I know that she does something magnificent and steampunky to do with her botanical mojo, but I don't know what.

But I wrote the opening paragraphs anyway, because I didn't want to lose them while I finish this interminable novel here in front of me.