Kage Baker did not really believe the old saying Better late than never. She wanted things done on schedule, in a timely manner, and just the way they’d been advertised. If offered something “just as good” as something she really wanted, her usual reaction was rejection. She’d rather have done without than compromise. And she’d rather have stayed up forever than to have sought her bed with a deadline ignored.

I try to follow her directives in this, at least the timing parts, because it’s quite true: things do go better if they are seen to on time. It’s a lot easier, usually, to keep on at something than to put it off and then have to run like the Red Queen just to stay in one place. Besides, I have years of falling into bed late at night after some detailed project with Kage – research, editing, fruitcake, stained glass – only to have her rouse her me two hours later by sitting bolt upright and announcing, “They should all be dry now – back to the salt mines!”

But Kage was usually talking in her sleep when she did that, thanks goodness. I could tell her we’d already finished, and she’d go back to deeper sleep. It always unnerved me, though, that she was evidently working on those projects steadily in her head all the while.

But I am not as stubborn as Kage was …

I’ve done nothing useful today, except take my brother-in-law to work when Kimberly was ill on waking up. Alas, by the time I got back home – though I was all eager to get to work a few hours early – I was also coming down with something. Chills, fever, shakes like a sobering alkie, headache, stomach ache – God knows what it is, because Kimberly brings home diseases unknown to science from her kindergarteners … poor little plague micelings.

I rolled back up in the bedclothes and became a cat habitat: which is apparently a career I could do well at if this writing business doesn’t pan out.

Anyway: did nothing, slept most of the day, only got up a while ago to get a blog entry in before the clock passed midnight. I could have as profitably filled the page with nonsense written in Wingdings – something Kage used to threaten to do. She had this idea of turning in 5,000 words in unreadable gibberish, and then using it for readings at Cons: just making up a new story every time.

So anyway: this is a marker. I got it in, and now I am going to try some late crackers and milk, and see if I live through the night.