Quota

It has been quiet round here this week, I know, mostly because I am in a productive spell of writing and triathlon training and light reading...

I have just finished writing what I commonly think of as quota for the day; quota is measured differently for different projects (if I'm drafting fiction, it's usually 1500 words, and if I'm writing academic stuff or non-fiction it's more conceived of as something like 5-6 coherent consecutive paragraphs in fully realized prose), but it can usually be produced in 2-3 hours, sometimes less if I'm on a roll, and is deliberately set below the maximum that could be written in a day: this so that it remains easy to write the next day as well.

(I have reached the final essay in the little book on style; it should be that I have a rough draft - the introduction is still patchy and needs some more reading and thinking before I can properly finish it - in three or four days, and I'm sort of shooting to send the entire book to my agent at the end of the first week of April.)

Light reading: Jacqueline Carey's first Kushiel trilogy, which I really loved (less complex than Dunnett, and a first-person voice that owes more to Renault than to Walter Scott, but in certain respects surprisingly similar in its themes and geographies - and check out the seriousness of the books' fans!) - thanks to Charlie Jane for the recommendation; David Levien, Where the Dead Lay (excellent); M. R. Hall, The Coroner (not bad, but hewing to a well-worn set of conventions); Martin Edwards, Take My Breath Away (interesting, wholly implausible but well-written); Liz Rigbey, Summertime (very good, but not quite as good as her first, and with a clumsy couple of pages in the middle that ridiculously transparently give away the plot twist - it does not spoil the book for me, I like knowing the ending in advance, but I am not a guesser-of-endings and it was nonetheless crystal clear from this point what was going to happen - a couple of details too pseudo-carelessly noted); Deon Meyer, Dead Before Dying (also quite farfetched in its plotting but very appealingly rendered - I'll look forward to reading the rest of the series).

The major cloud on the horizon: my beloved cat Blackie is suffering a recurrence of the fibrosarcoma that was surgically removed in December. The fact that it's come back so quickly tells me something that I hate to hear. He's spending this sabbatical year at my mother's house (it is cat heaven there!), but I'm going to bring him back here for the next month or two while I'm still in New York so that I can get some time with him while he's still in pretty good fettle. I'd already decided in December that I wouldn't have another round of surgery for him; it took him weeks to get over the anesthesia and surgery the first time, and he is almost seventeen years old, a good honorable old age for a cat. This is hard, though: he has been my constant companion since 1993...