Jilan, my much put-upon protagonist, got this to eat and drink while in the dungeon. Until it dawned on me that “water en brood” is the Dutch way to say “bread and water”. I’d already thrown the paragraph at the iwrislomo mailing list as the day’s sample:

If I was the king’s enemy and I’d caught the king, I’d either kill him or try to use him, not keep him in the cellar on water and bread and thin cabbage soup.

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My British ispell insists on putting the ‘o’ in.

After an excess of Real Life (which Boudewijn already wrote about, so I don’t have to) I was so stuck that I started revising from the beginning, making the existing text conform to the plot in my head. On the 23rd of May, a Sunday, I came to the end of Chapter 23 late at night, then did one more chapter before going to bed, one more, one more… until I closed Chapter 43 and ran out of chapters.

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But we almost got stranded at Olst.

We were half an hour later than we’d planned, meaning that we only had to wait slightly over an hour for a train to take us to Zwolle; someone working on a fuse-box ten miles further on had accidentally cut a cord.

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