A good day.

Yesterday was a 3,000+ word day. Some of them I may even keep.

It can be a peculiar sensation when you get into the zone like that, finding yourself pulled almost hypnotically back to the keyboard and monitor, even after you've decided to pause long enough to, oh, fetch the kids from school, supervise the homework, make dinner, run baths, walk the dog, fold the laundry, read bedtime stories . . .

Of course, you end up with only four hours sleep.

And then you realize that if every day were this productive, you'd be within reach of polishing off a book a month. Eight years at that rate and I'll have caught up with Wodehouse. And the only snag is that nobody's actually paying me to do it.

P.S. Solved the problem of which of the two ripostes to use (see "Now I remem--" ) by coming up with a third one. The same method that the Council of Constance used in 1414 to end the Great Schism of Western Christianity.

Milestone.

Just passed the 100,000 word point in the first draft.

This is also my general target for the entire book, after editing. Sobering thought, then, that with four chapters still to go, I plan to subtract as much as I intend to add.

Now I remem--

That worked. Ten minutes into the dog walk -- crossing the Playland parking lot, in fact -- I'd come up with two possible responses to Mallard's epiphany, both of them good. Don't know if either was the answer I'd thought of earlier, but it doesn't matter.

New problem: don't know which to use.

Thanks for the . . . what was it?

Irritating moment just now. As I romp toward the end of This Private Plot (the novel, not the blog), we hit that point on the graph where the mystification curve crests and begins to slope downward -- solutions are offered, puzzles are explained. What magicians call "the reveal," only they don't have to stick around to tell you how it was done. ("There's still one thing I don't understand, Inspector . . .")

Almost from the beginning, I've had a vivid image of how one reveal is accomplished, a moment when my character Superintendent Mallard (Mallard of the Yard) steps forward from the shadows and says something utterly baffling to those around him, but which quickly -- well, after a tantalizing cutaway -- shows that he has unraveled at least one of the strands of the mystery.

It was so real in my head that I didn't bother to add it to my notes. Mallard makes his cryptic utterance -- yes, that's fine, got all that. And, to conclude the scene, the suspect responds with  . . . what? I know I had an equally good riposte for him, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. Bugger. (Sorry, Mum.)

I'll take the dog for a walk. The exercise combined with the opportunity to think often produces results. If that fails, I'll take a shower -- the ozone and the head massage are also good for ideas. (Actually, I'll take the shower anyway. It's Tuesday, after all.) If I still can't remember, I'll take the dog for a walk in the shower and see if that does the trick.

A high wind in Rye.

Rapping, rapping at my rear deck door. About 10:00 a.m. this morning, during a rainstorm. It's the homeless squirrels I feel sorry for.

(I'm kidding, of course. I hate the bushy-tailed bastards, digging up my lawn just in case they buried an acorn there last year and forgot about it, like an amnesiac pirate. And they used to eat my front steps.)

Now everyone I tell about the tree immediately shakes his or her head sadly and tells me it's going to cost me a packet to have it dismembered and removed. But when I suggest to the mem-sahib that I rent a chain saw and do the job myself, she laughs so heartily that I can barely make out her "Of course not." This is an unfair besmirchment of my reputation -- I've only had to go to the emergency room once in the last few years for a blade-related incident, and it was only a few stitches. Everything else, I managed to treat at home, and my current navy blue thumbnail was the result of slamming the thumb in my underwear drawer, nothing to do with tools.

The Daily Insult.

This picture is a portrait of me, drawn on my office whiteboard by six-year-old Tertius. The original had the number "86" on my chest.

Since I don't possess any numbered sports jerseys, I asked him where it came from.

"Aren't you eighty-six?" he asked innocently. "Oh, wait, I know, you're fifty-two," he adds cheerfully.

"Fifty-three," Primus corrects him instantly as he walks by.

How many idiots does it take NOT to screw in a lightbulb?

Okay, confession time. Guilty pleasure #45. Being on Yahoo! News and clicking the "Dear Abby" link. And once in a while . . . Well, I quote:

DEAR ABBY: I'm having a dispute with my husband. He thinks you screw in a lightbulb clockwise. I disagree. I say counter-clockwise. Which of us is correct?  ERIKA IN PELHAM, ALA.

DEAR ERIKA: He is. You screw in a lightbulb by turning it to the right, the same way you tighten a lid on a jar -- which is clockwise. The mnemonic for this is: "Right is tight; left is loose."

I mean, why don't . . . ? Are you so . . . ? Abby, why are you even . . .? Oh, never mind. You have just witnessed the rare event of words failing me.

Good night, sweet prince.

Whenever I’m asked who I think is (or was) the most beautiful movie star ever, I usually say Jean Simmons.

And then I usually have to explain that I mean the English actress who starred in Great Expectations, Guys and Dolls and Spartacus, not that guy from KISS with the long tongue.

Alas, today’s news brings word of the death of 80-year-old Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier’s choice for the film role of Ophelia when she was only in her teens. A sad end to a week that also unexpectedly took Robert B. Parker. Mind you, he went at his desk.

However, as I’m looking at the brief tribute to Ms. Simmons on the BBC News website, I notice there’s a box showing the current ranking of the most popular stories. The latest from Haiti is number one, Venuzuelan oil number two, Jean Simmons’ passing number three, some fresh horror story from Nigeria, number four . . .  All with today’s dateline.

But at number five, a report headed “Bed Sharing Drains Men’s Brains.” From 2006.

Intrigued, I click and discover that for men, but not for women, the sleep interruptions that come from a partner’s movements in the night is enough to impair their mental ability the next day and increases stress hormones, at least according to an article in New Scientist based on research at the University of Vienna. And a sleep expert from an English University comments: "Historically, we have never been meant to sleep in the same bed as each other. It is a bizarre thing to do.”

Perhaps what’s even more bizarre, though, is the fact that this is currently the number one shared story for BBC News, four years after its first appearance.

Why do I think most of the sharing is between husbands and wives? But which direction?

The f-word. Yup, that f-word.

In the days when I had a website, I had a (pleasingly longish) list of extracts from favorable reviews of my published books. I concluded the first list with a comment from my adoptive mother -- possibly the only comment she made to me about the book: "I see you used some bad language."

Mum, you ain't heard nothing yet.

(Her comment on the second book was "I won't give a copy to your aunt, I don't think she'd approve." This, from the woman who handed me my first Agatha Christie when I was twelve, and so is partly to blame for the fact you're reading this tripe.)

Of course, the supposed bad language was only bad for her generation and her cultural milieu. American readers would expect the English to pepper their conversation with "bloody" -- and I do -- perhaps without realizing that, until fairly recently, it was quite offensive back in England. Well, to my mother's generation, anyway. Much more "goddamn" than "goshdarn." It led to the creation of a slew of "minced oaths" (although I like the word "discursives"): "blooming," "blasted," "bleeding," "ruddy."  Same with "bugger." In the US, I've heard that applied to children -- little things that bug us, like rugrats or anklebiters, not its alternative dictionary meaning of . . . well, look it up. Same as "sod."

However, in deference to my late mother's sensibilities, I had never dropped the f-bomb on my readers.  "What if my mother reads this?" was still a guiding editorial principle for bad language and scenes of sexual activity when I was in my forties and into my second marriage. Truly.

But today -- if I can get all my bills paid first and walk the dog -- I have to write a joking comment that's highly relevant to character development, and it's based on confusing two of the f-word's many functions: its literal meaning and its use as an intensifer. (Actually, it's the present participle form.)

And it has to be that word. Nothing else seems to work. We don't use other synonyms for copulation as intensifiers: "She's bonking amazing," "You are so shagging dead." Or vice versa, there don't seem to be any commonly used intensifiers -- many of them minced oaths -- that also mean to fornicate: "Let's go home and freak our brains out." Besides, why serve sevruga when there's beluga in the fridge?

I could always use the "f***ing" option, but it does severely weaken the impact of the joke. It's like decaf. It's like alcohol-free beer. It's like going skinny-dipping but keeping your underwear on.

Well, I'm a big boy now, so it's on with the blindfold and then type away.

Now I just have to worry about my children reading it.

Finsbury revisited.

You wait years to write Finsbury the Ferret's next appearance in the Swithin chronicles, and it's done in a day's work. (That's about the same anticipation-to-experience ratio as a ride at Disney World.) Of course, it'll be tweaked and refined many times, but the guts of the scene is substantially in place. The ferret was rude about Oliver's driving, too.