_Taint_ is up to 6,312 words.  That's 1,042 words for the day.  I had some bad news last night, so it was a nice contrast today to spend some time in jewel-coloured worlds with magic eggshells in them.  Sometimes writing seems like a job, and sometimes it's play.  Today, it was play that lightened my heart enough that I was able to gain some perspective on my bad news.  It's difficult, but not devastating.

And now, of course, I'm wondering whether the tone that today's writing took is too silly, and I'm trying to figure out how to balance the whimsical with the consequences of, for instance, having a piece of heavy debris land on an uninvolved bystander.  (The crushed police cars I'm not so worried about.)  But I'll fret about those things more when I have a manuscript upon which to inflict said fretting.

Today's research topics: Russian folklore; dietary deficiencies in birds; medicinal uses of hawthorn.