This may not make it into the final Book IV,\u00a0 but even if it doesn’t this isn’t a huge spoiler.\u00a0 I don’t think.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But imagine you’re Dorrin Verrakai, and a Personage (one of several in the book) comes to visit–a Personage whose attitude to magery is not exactly positive.<\/p>\n
And one of your very young relatives–a little girl about six–comes running in with a bird in hand and blurts out that she rescued it from the stable cat.\u00a0 By putting the cat to sleep so she could extract the bird from its mouth.\u00a0\u00a0 And another child assures you (and the Personage) that the cat is fine, too, because he woke the cat up and fed it.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t expecting this.\u00a0 Someone else, I thought, would be the next person to appear with a\u00a0 completely different message, but when this burst into my head it was too good to ignore.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, we had an internet gap from about quarter to 2 am (when, as I was watching the Shuttle back off from the ISS on NASA TV, we lost it) to late this afternoon.\u00a0\u00a0 Annoying as it was not to be able to check email, send email, read and post to things, the result work-wise was 3000 words on Book IV without hand soreness.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, I did half of tomorrow’s wordage today.\u00a0\u00a0 Book IV is now just over 115,000 words.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I expect to be a little over 120,000 by the time of husband’s surgery on Monday.<\/p>\n
Hmmmm.\u00a0\u00a0 If I took just 3 days a week completely offline, could I accomplish the 10K words a week with less strain?\u00a0\u00a0 Probably not…I need to be “on book” at least five, more often six, days a week, at least for a little.\u00a0 But absolute adherence to “zero internet until the day’s work is done” might be a good idea.\u00a0 (I can hear a snarky little voice inside saying “Yeah, like that’s<\/em> going to work!!”\u00a0 Well…maybe it is.\u00a0 Read on.)<\/p>\n