Hexapuma, For the Win!

It having been a stressful week (hah!), I thought a brisk game of Flying Mouse with Mozart might be in order before I got with Fledgling. Scrabble was catting the co-pilot's chair in Steve's office and Hex was...elsewhere, so I figured it would just be Mo and me.

...which it was, for the first two or three passes, then Hex exploded out of nowhere, threw himself between Mozart and the Flying Mouse at a height of at least a foot off the floor, captured the prize, and -- fled.

Mozart and I play a gentleman's game of Flying Mouse -- I wave the flexy wand, the mouse flies, Mozart captures, shakes, and releases, which is my cue to make with the flexy wand again.

Hexapuma apparently subscribes to the philosopy that one keeps what one kills. The mouse was his; he'd caught it fair and square, and he wasn't giving it back. He dragged the flexy wand out of my hand and made for the back of the kitchen, mouse gripped firmly in his jaws, wand dragging after. I caught him and tried to persuade him to drop the mouse -- no go. I carried him, the mouse and the wand to the bedroom, put him on the bed and gave him a full-body massage, on the theory that he would relax his grip. Silly me. Steve tried. No go. Hex slipped off the bed and fled down the hall, where he had a brief encounter with Mozart, who whapped him a good one on the head, clearly encouraging him to stop acting like a damnfool.

Despite this excellent advice, Hex opted for damnfool, and dragged the mouse (with the string and the wand trailing behind) under the kitchen table. At this point, Steve and I grew concerned that he had somehow actually gotten his teeth stuck in the furry mouse-body, and knelt down next to him to try to figure out if this was so, getting a warn-away for our trouble. He fled to the back of the living room, where he -- dropped the mouse. I stepped forward quickly and picked Hex up; Steve picked up the wand and hung it away.

Hex now lies, exhausted but victorious, on the file box at my knee. Mozart is asleep on his (formerly my) rocker. Outside, it's cold and blowing hard, with little spits of snow riding the back of the wind.

On Growing Like Topsy

The section of Fledgling that has been rewritten now encompasses 80,127 words. In theory, there are a mere 19,863 words "to go." Alas, that is too few words to contain the Rest of the Story; at this point, I'm looking for The Compleat Fledgling to clock in at about 120,000 words. I really want to have this book done and outta here by December 15; if I can get all four days at the end of next week as Writing Days, I may make that. If the day-job would settle ferghodsake down so I could hear myself think at the end of the shift, I'd take it kindly. I can't keep the story's flow in my head unless I work with it every day, and working with it every day hasn't been in the cards for months.

We've got two other books under contract with Baen -- Saltation and the sequel to Scout's Progress. (Also, there's this short story that I want to write, but that's Extra Credit, really) Given that I'm hoping to be turning in Fledgling on Saltation's original due date (with Toni's agreement, nice lady that she is), we're going to have to be looking veeerrrrryyyyy carefully at the re-negotiated deadlines for those two books. I know Baen is doing a Good Thing by shortening the publication time between books (received wisdom: you cannot have a Career on one book a year), but it's no good if we can't write 'em that fast.

Sigh. Time to remind myself that I worked hard to get to a place where this kind of stuff is a problem...