Thank you so much for the reassuring further comment. It seems I can never resist attempting at some kind of illusion of sharing the character’s mind. The character obviously hardly needs to quite elucidate to himself all the facts of what has happened before. Perhaps in this case the darting about of Remus’s thoughts is both plausible and particularly evocative, because he needs to process a recent event and this is more than he can bear quite yet.

I don’t think I’ve ever managed to write much without believing that what I’m writing has a purpose – that the piece is going to be meaningful to me and possibly to some recipients, too. (Perhaps this is selfish, but simply doing justice to a random prompt – if it were possible when writing a story without meaning to me – would not be enough of a purpose for me.) At least I can’t remember ever abandoning a beginning of a story, or of an instalment in the chaptered fic, after having written more than one or two paragraphs for it. This seems to mean that I give up after the first lines, if I see no point in what I’ve churned out, or if I see that the scene I’m showing doesn’t serve the purposes of the story.