Actually, my sofa isn’t super comfortable. It’s gotten squishy in the wrong parts. And the cat has scratched it to kingdom come. But lying on it makes me feel slightly less like a slug than lying in bed.

I have been Under the Weather lately. And I had to go to a tax consultant this morning, which sucked. Usually Thomas and I do our own taxes, but this year it’s all kinds of complicated. Our tax person was very nice—and showed us two original Renaissance woodcuts—but we owe. We don’t just owe, we OWE. So I had to lie on the sofa to recover. I’m still recovering. And eating blueberry yogurt for toddlers. Not that I have any toddlers. But the yogurt is so good, and it’s packaged so cutely.

Meanwhile, I’m editing my second book. Tinkering here, tweaking there. Cutting. I feel much better about cutting than I did. It used to feel painful. Now it’s like tossing out dusty junk. I knew an Israeli girl in Prague who, when moving from her apartment, decided to do it by herself. She was carrying all of her possessions across Prague—on trams, over bridges, etc. And everything got heavier and heavier. So she began abandoning things. When she arrived at her new home, she had only a small bag. She said the experience made her feel free and happy. I get attached to stuff, so it’d be hard for me to do as she did. And, ok, it is still hard to cut things from a draft, but thank goodness I have an excellent editor who says, “Do you really need this?” And you know what? I never really do.

I wrote a sentence in Book 2 that was Shakespearean. I had never written a sentence that was Shakespearean, but this one was. It even scanned. Not perfectly—but that’s Shakespearean in and of itself, because he wasn’t wedded to the iambic pentameter line like Marlowe. My sentence played around with ideas about quantity, like Sonnet 73. It was very pretty.

And it had absolutely no business being in my second novel. Also, last time I checked, I sure wasn’t Shakespeare. So I deleted it.

Well, back to the draft—and to thinking about fun things, like the season premier of Battlestar Galactica. BSG, how do I love thee? Let me count the Cylons.