I’m the only healthy one in the house at the moment. You wouldn’t believe all the fetching and carrying I’m having to do. My Master has a bad back, my Mistress has a bad ear, James has a cold, Shadow has a bad leg. What is the world coming to? I am the single pawed nursing service in the house. To be fair, the rest of the house do seem to be working through their own difficulties and don’t expect a great deal of nursing, which is a relief given that it isn’t something that comes naturally to me. Having a strong chest and a loud howl don’t come in that useful as nursing skills. I lack a certain amount of dexterity when it comes to carrying things and I tend to eat the sustenance before it gets as far as the patient, but other than that I do all right.
My Mistress has now written over 20,000 words of her new book. That means she’s about a quarter of the way in and she’s only killed two people so far. There are one or two (or four) left to be killed before the end of the book, so there should be enough to keep the reader interested, as long as they like crime. The man doing the investigating needs to find out about the mysterious half-brother today. If you were waiting to read the book, I don’t think I’ve given too much of the plot away. She’s riding a bit of a high having had two short stories short listed in competitions this week and a poem of hers due to be published next week. I said to her, that’ll be your three things then. You won’t get anything else published for a while, but she didn’t take my helpful comment all that well.