thoughts chasing themselves

Thoughts of the novel are running around in my head, even (especially?) when I'm not sitting in front of the computer. Some ideas about time—how it should probably start at the beginning of summer, more or less, and have events distributed so as to fill up the summer more equitably. Or, maybe my thing of having it end at Halloween is silly? misguided?? Or maybe it should start later, in July? Nothing pragmatic is occurring to me.
Isabel and Jason go to the prison?? is this at all believable? What else is happening at the same time? What are Carl and Nancy doing? do they talk about what happened at Mr. Six’s? Or avoid each other?
Carl should see Lily in some way or other; maybe she asks him to come over and move some stuff for her; and gives him something as a keepsake. Nancy—I have no idea what she’s doing. Her mother comes to visit? Or one of her friends from Cleveland???
Remind myself that the end of June is a goal, not a whip to beat myself with.

To avoid the above questions and others, I spent some time trying to read Erich Heller's "The Artist's Journey into the Interior" but sentences like this discouraged me:

From Winckelmann through Keats and Holderlin to Nietzche's own Birth of Tragedy and Rilke's 'Torso of Apollo,' European poetry and aesthetic speculation assumed again and again, as if under compulsion, the stance and posture of Goethe's Iphigenia as, exiled to a barbarous coast, she seeks with her inmost soul the land of the Greeks.

Now that I've typed that out, though, I have to say it makes more sense. And I quite liked "the art that, in all its scenes, shows... the scenery of the farewell bidden to the external world by the soul of man," which is about the Romantic vision, I think.
Hegel is mixed in to all this somehow--he's in the subtitle ("A Hegelian Prophecy and Its Fulfillment"), but I haven't figured out how yet.
But maybe I'll give it at least one more try.