I’d just finished making notes on a work meeting I’d had. It contained a lot of jargon.

“We can pull from the [redacted] up to every fifteen minutes but if we do it too often the company will throttle us and force us onto overnight push feeds.”

After which I went out to get some lunch.  Sherylyn was in the kitchen watching a demonstration video.

“That’s a lot of puddle in the middle,” she murmurs. “I’d be stretching that out.”  And a little later, “Which piggy is he using?”

It’s a jargon-ridden life, that’s for sure. Sometimes I’m surprised we write even semi-coherent novels. 

Speaking of novels, we have just hit 50,000 words on the first draft of the novel we are working on. No, not the only novel we’ve been working on for the last 12 months (progress has been slow during the pandemic), that’s put aside waiting for some distance. We always like to give our novels time between drafts if we can. This is a new one, and the writing has been faster.

Usually, if a story we’re writing makes it to 20,000 words it’s a goer (more jargon, or is that slang ), although we do have one or two novels sitting above that waiting for either more input or a final ‘under the bed you go’ decision, but if it’s 20,000 words we generally keep writing. 

When a story gets to 50,000 words however, we finish it. Even if we don’t like it when we’re done. Even when we hit that dreaded middle-book slump—around the 60,000 word mark for us—we’ll push through. This one has been fun to write so far, and so much easier than anything else in the last two years. Maybe one day you, too, will get to meet Augustus Aurealis.