Fic progress

I have actually been doing some typing on Ch13 of Hertha, trying to fix the horrifyingly paralysing issue of the gunshot in the flashback, the prospect of tackling which had kept me from so much as touching the manuscript for six months; I've succeeded in introducing a couple more allusions to the sound of the shot and pushed more bits of Hertha's narrative into the grammatically less ambiguous past-perfect tense as a result, which I think has *probably* patched the perceived problem sufficiently, although I shall need to run the result past somebody to check (probably meibruges again!) However, I have perhaps inevitably ended up starting work on this past midnight every day, due to chronic procrastination -- the only reason why I have got round to it at all, really, is that I have now reached a stage where all the *other* tasks queued up are those that feel even less inviting, so that this now becomes an escape mechanism rather than a thing to be escaped.

(It currently looks as if Ch13 is going to come out at around 6,000 words, which is a lot, but not actually any more than the existing Chapter 7 and Ch4...)

Chapter lengths:
Ch1: "Can it be Christine?"	3551
Ch2: "We Can Make it Work"	4754
Ch3: "As if Awoken from a Dream"	3914
Ch4: "She Won't Thank You For It"	6078
Ch5: "An Accident... Simply an Accident"	4480
Ch6: "He'll Stop at Nothing"	5402
Ch7: "It Will Be At Midsummer"	6061
Ch8: "Why So Silent, Good Messieurs?"	5105
Ch9: "Well-Beloved Wife"	4242
Ch10: "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again"	3616
Ch11: "You Betrayed Me"	4845
Ch12: "I Need to See the End"	3502

Trough harvest

I have been collecting cornflower seed (and have discovered, since the plant is leaning over a clear patch of balcony rather than other pots, that the reason why I struggled to find any in the past is that the 'window' during which the seed is harvestable is a pretty short one, since when the fluffy seed heads have opened it is generally a sign that the actual seeds have dropped out!) and have now gleaned what I could from the two varieties of Gypsophila in the trough. I never did identify the plants that looked like snapdragon but were not any kind of toadflax or other Linaria that I could see, but the above seed is from the delicate white Gypsophila elegans.

I have one single plant that looks like flax from the Flowers for Birds half of the trough, but the 'flax' in there was supposed to be Linum rubrum and this flower-bud is blue, so I imagine that it is just another bird-gift, or a leftover from last year. Apart from that I see no sign that *any* of the buckwheat husk stuff germinated, I'm afraid; the only plants I have in there are the usual chickweed, corn-marigold, red poppy, corn-chamomile, speedwell and forget-me-not.

Unknown

I still can't pin down this plant species, attractive as it is :-(

Going by the 'tails' on the flowers I think they've got to be some kind of Linaria, but they don't grow their blooms in spikes (unless my specimens are all horribly undernourished and can only manage one or two buds per cluster) and they are much bigger than the wild toadflax -- more like sweet-pea flowers.

(no subject)

Reading a study of A.E.Housman (of 'Blue Remembered Hills' fame) and identifying *so hard* right now...