My Mistress is feeling very pleased with herself. She entered her first novel in a competition in America and has just received copies of the judges reports. They mark the novel on a number of categories and most of the judges gave her almost full marks with the exception of one area, which is where the novel begins and of everything that is the easiest thing to fix. One judge even gave her top marks for everything. It looks as though she couldn’t have been very far from going through to the shortlist. Now she has something to work with to improve the opening before sending it out to more publishers. She is feeling quite excited after having a week where almost everything to do with her writing has gone wrong. I think she will be sitting at her desk working very hard next week. I guess I shall have to keep the girls occupied so that she can get on.
The snow and ice has almost melted. When it did start to go it went very quickly with some interesting and very odd sound effects. The big piles on the roof came down in fairly solid lumps and kept making Shadow jump. In some cases they hit things on the ground as they landed and made some very spooky noises as they came down. At one point my Mistress was getting quite concerned about the damage that could be caused. I don’t know if I told you but a while ago a pigeon died on our roof and lodged itself in the gutter. The gutter is very high and so the dead pigeon remained with its wing hanging over the edge. In the bad weather it was the site of a very long icicle. My master considered reaching out of the window to break it off but my Mistress didn’t fancy the prospect of it coming down with decomposed dead pigeon attached to the other end.