Just another day of revision...

My web browser has tabs open to the UC Davis Veterinary Medicine page, the Doctor of Vet Med curriculum, a search result on crisis pregnancy centres, a page of search results on 'adoption in the 1980s', a history of forced sterilisation in the US, a calendar for 2004, several Google street views of Las Vegas, the Wikipedia page for second-wave feminism, several photographs of New England lobster boats and Floridian crab boats, the Web MD brief history of mifepristone, and Amazon pages for Building Your Cult: Power, Politics, and People and Combatting Cult Mind Control, two indispensable volumes for the modern reader.  Drugs don't get much of a look-in this time because I did way more research than was really necessary for The Shore, and I have the kind of freaky memory that can't recall my spouse's birthday but can perfectly recall useless information from years ago.

The good thing about all that is that the novel is no longer riddled with embarrassing notes like (insert two paragraph description of a crab boat). The bad thing is that it's starting to get too long to be easy to handle, which is odd because it seemed almost too short to be a proper novel, both when I was first writing it and every time I look at the skinny little notebooks in which I wrote it. I have an unhealthy preoccupation with tracking my progress in fractions, which gets more difficult at a certain length because Word gives up on providing a word count once the 100,000 word mark is reached. After 99,999 you're on your own for some reason.

Pictured: the moment before I stopped being able to figure out exactly how many words I had left to clean up without a serious amount of jiggery-pokery.

The beast still lacks a title, but I'm starting to be a little less ashamed of it, or most of it at any rate. Though I do wonder what the NSA makes of my Google habits.