“I’m going to bake some chicken, Mummy.”

“It’s 9:30!” (At night.)

“Did you have dinner?”

(pause) “No, I had peanut brittle!” Well, peanut chikki. By any other name…

It was a pretty good day, filled with a little of the old ultraviolence. Well, a lot. I poisoned somebody horribly and arranged to send his semi-preserved head to his parents; then I bashed somebody else’s head in with a baseball bat and dismembered them. One of these people had it coming, the other didn’t. (I did soothe a rape victim in between, though.) I’ve come a long way from feeling squeamish at my first kill.

(I felt uneasy with that paragraph, wondering if the FBI would pay me a visit. Then I remembered that this is an Internet with *****************, with your most bizarre nightmare filled in there. I still feel nervous, but that’s probably because deep within, I’m culturally a nice Irish Catholic girl.)

What made that first kill particularly trying is that the readers found her enormously likable (in only half a dozen or so pages). Hell, I liked her too. I was overly artsy about describing her death, so they had this big denial thing going on, which I’ve done myself. For a while, I toyed with just having her be badly injured, but . . . nahhh. Jaded though I am, I still feel really bad about today’s innocent victim, who was only a teenager. I don’t suppose my serial killer can just symbolically gut stuffed bunny rabbits?

My hands hurt. The left one is just being whiny, because almost all of today’s work was longhand. Not counting breaks, it was about a six or seven hour writing day. My daughter was concerned; said my head would explode. But I was on a roll, and am thinking of doing some more transcribing. A piece of today’s transcription stands alone, so I’ll pop it in next post.