Stuck on a plot hole for 6 months, fixed it in one afternoon walk

I was writing this sci-fi short where the whole premise hinged on why the colony ship's AI went silent, and every draft I did just felt fake. I kept rewriting the same two scenes over and over, probably 15 versions, and I almost scrapped the whole thing. Then last Tuesday I took a walk down to the river by my house in Tacoma and saw this old rusted buoy half sunk in the mud, and it just clicked. The AI wasn't broken, it was waiting for a signal that never came because the crew put the wrong frequency in decades ago. Has anyone else had a fix come from some random sighting or everyday object, or am I just weirdly late to that party?

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coran631mo ago

Did you ever read that thing about how Archimedes figured out the whole displacement thing in a bath? It's kind of like that. Our brains just keep chewing on stuff in the background, and then something real and rusty kicks it loose. That buoy thing is a great trigger, by the way. I've had it happen with a cracked coffee mug and a weird stain on a wall, so no, you're not late to anything. The brain just likes to surprise us when we stop staring at the same screen.