Christmas Cake

 

Penny Bright is never going to reach 30.

I mean, not because of a life of adventure. It is just that I came back from Athens and started writing a book that was set in the same year and month that I'd been there. September, 2018. Now I'm coming up on the three-year mark and finishing up the third book but Penny has just reached the last day of 2018.

The Christmas Cake is described as "better than fruit cake, but still no-one wants one after the 25th." Which is a funny observation, as the week after Christmas is a crazed round of cooking all the special festival foods required for the New Year, with all sorts of interesting rules about which ends of the chopsticks the gods use and all but I have to leave all of that stuff out of the book.

Well, Penny doesn't turn 25 until 2019. But at the current pace of writing, I won't live long enough to get her to 2024.

Had breakfast at the cafe today and it worked, again. I plowed through a huge number of notes and managed to come up with ways to solve my current plotting issues. It also added a whole extended chase scene through scenic Shiragawa-go so now I have that to deal with...

And I didn't even have cake.