But my day did not end there. In the evening it rained, and when it rained it poured—and there was a leak in our roof. I remembered the day that had been made, because we had heard a thunk, and I had gone up to check where a falling branch had punctured the roofing, but we hoped it might still be watertight. It was the same day that a dead cat turned up in our yard, and I had to bury it. Our dogs don't like cats, but the neighbors' cats choose not to believe that; we heard a horrendous commotion in the night, and this was the result. So now we had the verification: the roof was no longer tight. Sigh. I went down to check our rain gauge—two inches—and on the way saw a gourd I had overlooked. You see, this year a seed sprouted from some buried garbage and it turned out to be a hypnogourd, a species seldom seen outside the Land of Xanth. Its vines grew at the rate of ten inches a day—yes, I measured—

and it produced about twenty handsome gourds scattered across our yard. They look and taste rather like butternut squash. No, of course we did not look into any peepholes! But this shows how I can't even go to check rain without evoking all manner of oddities.

I turned in, reading myself to sleep on The Blood of Ten Chiefs, in which a story of mine appears. Then, at 1:50

A.M., the phone rang: a fan calling from Minnesota to talk with me. My wife put him off, for I was dead to the world; I keep regular hours, and am up before 6:00 A.M. regardless. Next year we plan to build on our tree farm and move there; we shall, with regret, also move to a post-office box so fans can't locate me and drop in uninvited and we shall get an unlisted phone, so that we can sleep at night.

That is the story of how I failed to do any paying work that day, completing three weeks of much the same. It was obvious that Satan had no intention of allowing me to work on this novel in peace. Nevertheless, I buckled down to it, and wrapped up the novel Christmas Eve: eight more chapters in twenty-four days. Late Christmas Day I started this Author's Note.

But there were longer-range things to handle, too, all surely the mischief of Satan. One was my shoulder.