Stalled Out

OK, it's Monday night and I'm still in the motel drinking Tab and eating baguettes and peanut butter. I finished the draft of the novella yesterday, and everything was going just fine. 49 pages and rewrites in about 36 hours, so I deserved some time off, right?
Wrong. I started wrestling with ICE BLUE, and I tell you, the sucker is stronger than I am. And meaner. It just doesn't like the way I'm writing it (or maybe it's the girls in the basement, or my wicked fairy godmother or something). I've written about forty pages and they're just WRONG. Funny, fast-paced, sexy and romantic, but they're not the book I need to be writing.
So instead I watched the Oscars and figured I could start Monday morning.
Monday morning dawned, and I decided I probably had to start anew. That those 40 pages couldn't be reworked into something right. But first I sent them off to my friend Lynda Ward, so she could tell me I was brilliant and mistaken (or brilliant and absolutely right) and then I proceeded to start the book anew.
Twelve pages later, twelve fast-paced, sexy, funny pages later, and it's still wrong. Oh, it'll make a charming romantic suspense, on the run novel. But it's totally missing what makes an ICE book work.
And then Lynda e-mailed, after nobly dropping everything to read the 40-some pages, and told me my instincts were right. Great book, but not the right book.
So now I've got to start again, and I guess I'll just have to keep on starting until I get it right.
The first line in the first opening was "It was hell being a cat burgler."
The first line in the second opening was "In her admittedly short twenty-seven years Summer Hawthorne had had some hideous days, but this one was promising to win some sort of prize for awfulness. "
I think tomorrow morning I'm going to start with "He didn't want to kill her."
Now that sounds like an ICE book.
Pray for me, brothers and sisters.