The Curse of the Pushy Qualm.

I'm hearing voices in my head. It's my inner editor, who didn't like my idea for a funny scene.

I've discovered that if I have a qualm, it's fatal to ignore it or it comes back and bites me on the bottom. Appeasement doesn't work -- if part of my brain manages to shout louder than my smugness and tell me the idea sucks, I ignore it at my peril. So I had to dump my carefully prepared whimsy and come up with something better. Quite right, too.

Here's what we lost. I had Oliver doing some outdoor surveillance in the middle of the night. To protect his eyeglasses in case of attack, he's wearing a diver's face mask, and he's disguising his conspicuous blond hair with a dark wetsuit hood found with the mask. After a brief skirmish with another character, which he loses, he ends up sitting in a drainage ditch in two inches of water, clutching a snapped-off walking stick that could resemble a snorkel. Opportunity for the other character to make some finely-honed, hilarious, sarcastic comment, which I couldn't think of, about his choosing an odd time and place to practice skin-diving.

Yeah, too contrived. Thanks, qualm. I owe you.