It rain and rains, and there is no end in sight.  Alfie wakes up as usual at 5:30 or 6:00 and as usual I get up and head out for a walk with him, but he balks at the door when he sees the weather, and says No thanks, think I'll pass. 

Today I have two guys in the basement installing a new oil tank, and a guy in the garage installing a new garage door.  So instead of a quiet rainy day --- conducive to work --- it is a noisy rainy day: drills and power tools of all sorts.

I got an email from my editor, Margaret, at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt a little while ago, saying the copy editor had raised some questions regarding timing in my to-be-published-in-Fall book.  "Timing" meaning...if the character said this on Saturday, and then she did this on Sunday, but at some point she said "six days till.." wouldn't that mean that on Friday she...   etc. etc.  I am not quoting exactly because I don't want to describe the plot of the book this early.  But it is why we are grateful to copy editors.  Neither Margaret nor I had noticed the discrepancies that the CE caught.

And when those things are not caught, and slip past, and are published, there are always young readers out there who catch them and write to me demanding an explanation---which I don't have, except for my own stupidity and inattentiveness. (I sometimes also plead old age)

Sometimes what I do (and should have done, for this book) is use an actual calendar, marking on it what happens on each day. One of the mistakes the copy editor caught was that a character was attending school on a day which seemed to be Sunday. If I had used a calendar---and this, for a book in which all the action takes place in one week)....I would have seen that so easily.