Bad news, cats and staple guns.

The boring bit first. I've reached 100,000 words on Book of Pain only to find that I'm nowhere near finishing. That's not the bad news. What is, is that a particular avenue of sub-plot I've been pursuing throughout the book has reached a dead end. Bummer. So when I get to the re-write, I'm going to scrub the whole thing. It's  a pity because I had high hopes for it. It won't affect the outcome but anyone who has read my novels knows that I like quite a few sub-plots just to keep it interesting.

Cat stuff.

   Kitler, of whom I may have spoken is back. She of the chilli sauce and who wouldn't weigh ten ounces if dipped in liquid mercury. No don't tempt me. She came back in the middle of the night two days after the pizza incident. Even her pal, the panther/puma mutoid obviously realised she'd gone too far and legged it after the 666 monster dragged back the corpse of a blackbird weighing about three times her size and dumped it on my, yes MY bed. And this from a cat which only has about five teeth left in her mouth. Her point is well taken and I'm leaving the country before she gets even. I'd shoot her but that would probably just annoy it.

Staple guns

A while ago, with nothing to do, I spotted a cushion the cat had upchuked upon, probably after tearing apart the local dog fox, whom we haven't seen weeks. I decided to recover it. Thus, armed with an industrial staple gun, I cut out a piece from some cheap material my beloved had been reserving for something trivial about the house. No great loss there, I thought. However, upon stapling it, realised I hadn't measured it properly, but there was plenty left. Now using twice as much I tried again. I hate staple guns, especially this one which has a tendency to fire without the trigger being pulled. I tugged several errant staples out of the living room wall with pliers. Luckily the one that nearly hit the cat landed short. 


    On the third attempt I had come to the end of this cheap nasty stuff and done a fairly good job - that was if you didn't get too close, and squinted a bit, and laid it at the correct angle that you couldn't see the joins, and the parts where they didn't. Overall not a bad effort for my first try.

   A few hours later the love of my life returned home with a smile and a kiss. The last kiss as I recall, and asked if I'd seen that Hermes shawl she'd been keeping for a special occasion. In fact for this very night when she was going out with a bunch of friends who were all going to wear the very best clothes they had.

   I slept in the garage that night.

   And she found the holes in the wall.