Now I'm at 3,684 words (I feel like I'm writing a boring high school essay and counting every word -- "Only 46,316 to go"). Oh well, it is kind of encouraging to see how far I get each day. To know it's actually possible to do this thing, even if it isn't going to be the best I ever wrote (and it won't be, but that's what revision is for). Here's a little snippet:

"The folklore book was really hard to read. All academic. I finally ended up skipping the partsthat the author had written, and just reading the stories he quoted. They were neat. Like fantasy stories, only more real because people really believed they happened. The fairy book turned out to be pretty silly. It was all little people with butterfly wings and some totally fake-looking photographs. But it was the only one they had at the library. I found it next to the Sherlock Holmes books."

"That must've been The Coming of the Fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes, wrote that one, too. He was a little odd."

"Did Mum have that book?" Maddy set down her fork. She couldn't eat the overcooked green beans, but the lamb and potatoes and rutabaga had been delicious and filling.

Dad looked down at his plate, as if he were trying to decide whether or not to tackle his own beans. He poked at them, then said, "I think she did. She had a lot of books. '‘Plenty of goodness and just as much crap,' she used to say."

It's a bit of conversation between my main character, 14-year-old Madeline Fletcher Macleod (Maddy) and her dad (who doesn't have a name yet), about her mother (Mary Macleod, nee Fletcher), who died giving birth to Maddy. They've just moved back to Scotland, where Maddy was born (they left as soon as she was old enough to travel). Anyway, back to it.