Yesterday and today have been quiet days for me, for reasons I won’t itemize. Suffice it to say I’ve been unwell, in a manner that makes leaving the house inadvisable. I think I’m beginning to recover now. No great distress, just… inconvenience.

And no, there’s no fresh news about my car. They told me the end of the month; kind of pointless to nag them until then. Maybe I’ll just keep the loaner and call it even.

But I’m working on my revisions to King of Rogaland. At this stage I’m working with red pen on a printed manuscript, rather on screen. There are two reasons for this. One is that ink on paper just reads differently for me. That’s an odd thing to say for someone who reads almost exclusively on Kindle. But I don’t feel I can “grasp” my manuscript until I’m literally grasping an inch or so of ream in my hands.

The second, more practical reason is that I often have to page back and forth to see if one passage about a character or subject matches things I’ve written about it elsewhere. Continuity, it’s called. I find that a whole lot easier to do with physical paper. Riffling through dead tree pages is different from scrolling through screen pages, and it feels less daunting.

What I’m doing at this stage is, I’m becoming a student of my own book. I wrote it all, but I wrote it in various moods and states of alertness. There are themes there I need to bring out, and rabbit trails I need eliminate. In a sense the book itself is telling me what it wants to be. I just have to listen to it.

Do I like what I’m reading?

As a matter of fact, I do. I even find it moving in spots.