So I guess I got the hang of Thursday after all.  My expected distraction today didn’t develop, and I got a nice 1,733 words written.  Which would be excellent–but it turned out that it was yesterday I couldn’t get anything done!  Fortunately, I had that big cushion built up, so I finish out today 174 words behind the goal.  That’s a paragraph or two; I can deal with that.

It’s a funny thing about those word-count cushions.  You build what seems like a nice big one, a thousand words or so ahead of the game and the chart looks so pretty with the “written” line up above the “target” line…and then one slow day knocks it all out.  I was out most of yesterday evening, and I swear I was going to be good and write when I got home…but then I had a package.  And I’m compulsive about packages, they have to be opened, and if it’s something fun…well, it was a new picture, so it had to go on the wall, and by that point I figured Lyra and Dastan could wait until today.

Which they very nicely did, and still showed up to get work done tonight.  And anyway–if I ever got too far ahead, I suspect I’d lose all my motivation.  There wouldn’t be any challenge then!

Tonight’s excerpt:

There are many locked doors in our castle.  We’ve slept behind a locked door every night, for as long as I can remember.  Any doors leading outside are locked.  There are all sorts of spare rooms that are kept under a key.

But the most incontrovertibly locked room, the room that was kept the most inviolate, the most untouched and unvisited, was our mother’s.  It had been locked the day she died and, as far as we knew, it had never been opened.

Mother and Father had always had separate bedrooms; it’s common enough among royalty, although I suppose they must have, you know, visited.  There are twelve of us, after all.  But anyway, Mother had a room that was just hers.  Vira remembers it.  I don’t.

I think we get to visit the locked room tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to it.  🙂