This?
Was not supposed to be a 4200-word night.
In fact, I think I even promised kitsunealyc that it wouldn’t be.
But, um, that promise, it got broke real good. There are just bits of story that you cannot stop in the middle of, and this turned out to be one. Not because of explosions — the usual excuse — but because I really didn’t enjoy going some of the places I had to go, and once there, I’d rather just stay and get it all done with. Suffice to say that we are at the height of the Great Plague, at this point, and I feel obscurely that I owe it to the hundred thousand Londoners who died to do everything in my power to communicate just how horrific that was.
Horrific enough that people committed suicide rather than wait for the plague to finish killing them. Horrific enough that they threw themselves into the mass graves, already wrapped in their winding-sheets, as if they were corpses before they even died.
Imagining that is not exactly fun.
4200 words for seven scenes, most of them deeply unpleasant. It’s a good thing tomorrow’s scene will be . . . not exactly enjoyable, but a breath of air after this suffocating passage, because otherwise I’d be sorely tempted to take the day off. And then perhaps another, and then moving eats me alive, and the next thing I know I’m behind schedule and out of the novel’s headspace.
I’m making good progress, at least.
Word count: 85,888
LBR quota: What do you think?
Authorial sadism: See above.
