April 23rd – 357,123.

The doc gave Marion another (different) course of antibiotics yesterday and she’s dutifully taking yet more tablets. I counted up this morning, she takes ten with her morning coffee! That’s just ridiculous, but at the moment, that’s what’s required. Once she gets over this infection, the number will reduce. Anyway, she’s got a seven day course and instructions for me to take her back if she’s not over it by the end of them.

Because she’s poorly and wants to rest, that has freed up a bit more of my time yesterday and today, and since I had another great story idea I started jotting it down last night. I picked up those notes this morning and ran with it, resulting in a complete prologue and first chapter (it’s one of those stories that has to have a prologue or the first chapter doesn’t make sense – you can’t drop the ‘six months earlier’ flashback in later without disrupting the flow. Then after lunch I was a really good boy and picked up my main work in progress, cruising that past the 71k mark as well. All in all a great writing day, polishing off 5,103 words and leaving myself over 17 ¼ days ahead of schedule on the target.

As I’ve said before I’m going to need that time later in the year, so this is a good time to get race ahead like this. I reckon there are going to be three weeks during the summer (not contiguous ones) that I won’t be able to do much writing in, if any. If I can actually get 21 days ahead of schedule before those weeks I won’t be feeling guilty about falling behind. As always, the best way to deal with a problem is not to have the problem in the first place.