Things I wake up with ...

"Emerging naked from the bathroom, he slipped the plastic soap box into the fluffy blue pencil case and dropped it into the bottom of his briefcase, rummaging other contents about until it fell, concealed, to the bottom.   It never failed to bring a smile to her face, although his original explanation had not been anything to laugh about."

This is the first sentence of an additional four hundred word snippet introduced into 'Making good' to make a later episode more comprehendable.   It arrived, fully formed, before five thirty this morning.

Also today, and less satisfyingly, I made myself critique a most unsatisfactory book I began reading yesterday.  I was on the point of giving up after only ten pages, but then gave myself a stern talking to:  "Why is it so bad?" I asked, "how can you be so sure you're any better?"  and so I read another 200 pages, making notes.

This is my review:

First there isn't enough dialogue, so it feels heavy, but what there is is unreal. Use of words is either lazy or ignorant - someone 'swigs' from a bottle, several times, and female prisoners are referred to as 'ladies' when women would be more appropriate. The same phrase is repeated twice within a single paragraph, and the repetition of facts strongly implies that the writer believes each and every one of her readers to be thick as the proverbial. And there is a ludicrous amount of clothes description.