A decent day, not great. Spent last Thursday and Friday working on a few new chapters for the expanded Set the Seas on Fire, so I wasn't completely out of practice by this morning, but spent all day yesterday laid up with some sort of flu, which has left me with a sore throat and some sort of weird typing aphasia, that means that I keep typing the wrong word in a sentence. When typing "He leaned on his cane, his hands folded," I end up typing "He leaned on his hands, his hands folded." I must have done this twenty times today, at least that I caught. Lots of sentences that made sense in my head, and that lost something in the translation to the page. I've gone through and fixed as many as I could find, but I'm sure there's more. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll have the cobwebs shaken out, and can be back up to speed.

57,883 / 120,000 (48.2%)

Today's sample comes from the opening of "Jubilee," introducing Sandford Blank and Roxanne Bonaventure.

The light of the late morning sun streamed through the open shutters of the sitting room, dust motes dancing in the beam, while the bones of the breakfast meal idled on the table. The lilting tones of a flute echoed from the paneled walls, an improvised air on the tune of one of Child’s border ballads of Scotland, played by the man who leaned against the mantle, his eyes closed and his expression serene. The woman at the table, intent on the morning’s penny papers, tapped her foot in time, unconscious of the action. It was early June, and outside the temperature already climbed, the Marylebone streets bustling with the morning’s trade and traffic, but within the walls of Number 31, York Place, it was still relatively calm and cool. For the moment, at any rate.

There were some, even in this enlightened modern age, who might have considered it untoward that a man and a woman should pass the time together unchaperoned, which unmarried couples could not do without inviting comment, and which married couples seldom did at all. But this particular man, and this singular woman, rarely bothered themselves with what others might say about them, individually or collectively, and hardly gave the matter a moment’s consideration.