Hello January

Cold weather here in the north east brings pain from an old shoulder injury. The pain radiates from jaw to fingertips so everything seems like an effort. Even typing. I exist on Advil and heating pads while I try to pound out a few pages every day.
And my Blue Diamond seems to be a struggle right now. There are things I have to get settled within the story and it's freakin' boring. She's homeless but I need to have hero-man help her without her being too needy about it. So it's a battle between keeping her independent and letting him in enough to supply some help. I need her slightly indebted to him so she takes up the adventure he's offering.
Does any of this make sense?
How do you get over the abyss in your story? It's there, it tells us stuff we kind of need to know but I feel like I'm missing something here.

Drought

I'm at that middle part of the story that is in danger of dragging and I'm struggling. I feel like I need...something...here. This is the time in the story where I sometimes abandon the piece and write something different. And maybe taking a break isn't a bad thing but with this story I joined the Mayke it Happen challenge. I have to finish this by May 30th.
Usually not a hard thing to do but, and probably because I have a deadline, I'm stumped.
So how do you push past the drought?

Getting the groove back...

After getting the wind knocked out of your sails, when nothing seems quite so important as it did before, how do you get your groove back?
I've been taking my WIP to work with me and editing on my lunch our and any down time I may have. I work in a cubical now (love it!) and I'm pretty much out of sight from the powers that be so when I have nothing to do I pull out the old WIP and go at it. (or sometimes I go blogging)
But it's been a bad week and now when I look at my WIP -- I don't like any of it. I fight not to throw the whole thing in the trash because I'm guessing this might be a carry over of feelings from the bad week.
I think I need a good romance novel. Something with nice thoughts and happy endings. Something to lift my overall mood.
I had it.
But I lost it.
Take a break?
Or keep plugging along feeling like someone stuck pins under your finger nails?
What do you do when life throws you down?