author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Yeehah! About a thousand words yesterday, almost three thousand today; I might actually finish this thing on time!

So Gwen and her husband Tim are babysitting the wayward fictional Brooke at the bookstore knows as The Bookwyrm's Horde (which, by the way, will be the title of the novel that precedes this one in the series). Tim runs the store in the mornings and Gwen in the afternoons. Meanwhile Brooke is just hanging out. We have discovered some things about interfictional cosmology (and when I say "we" I am not being coy and meaning "the reader"; I mean "I just discovered this stuff today, isn't it cool?"), such as...

• Brooke can't read any "sibling" fictions--books written by people who call the same place Gwen does "the real world." The words become intelligible to her.
• This is not a contradiction with Brooke having read the manuscript of the novel Gwen wrote. Brooke is in that novel. She can read it just fine.
• Fictional characters who have travelled to their author's "real world" are going to want to steer very clear of the Bookwyrm's Horde, or at least the actual shelves. They do not want to meet the Bookwyrm.
• The Bookwyrm's lair looks very different to an author than it does to a talemouse. For one thing, it's not nearly as scary.
• The Bookwyrm cannot tell stories. It can only collect them.

And there are other things. I've changed the excerpt on display in my profile. It's a little rough, as might be expected from the term "rough draft," but it's super cool for all that. You should go read it. Totally.