Rabbit legs and superstitions

I am back from the meeting with my advisor. University is crawling with students ... it's the first week of lectures. They all look so young and tiny. There are banners hung up all over the College of Arts protesting the universities decision to scrap two Arts departments. There was even a chalk sign scrawled on the bus stop - "Arts Students are not welcome here." On a side-note, I saw a little black cat running across the lawn with a big juicy rat hanging from its mouth. All the students who saw it applauded. That cat must be feeling pretty good about itself right now.

I haven't written any more since yesterday. I spent the morning thrashing the plot into some kind of shape.

It was really nice to hear my advisor say that he enjoyed the chapters. (Nice? Terrible word). He said he sat down intending to read a few pages and then get on to his other work, but he ended up reading all sixty A4, single-spaced pages at a sitting. I'm only giving him the chapters as and when I'm moderately happy with them ... that is, happy that they make sense and are coherent and have the basic rudiments of structure. As I left he gave me a wink and said "It's almost like reading a real book."

He is very confident that it will be published. That is encouraging. I am confident too, when I'm not rocking back and forth in a corner chewing the ends of my hair and freaking out. I am so looking forward to it being published that I am superstitious about it ... I won't let myself look too hard at the possibility in case my attention somehow jinxes it. So I'll carry on the way I have been. Just moving forwards, pushing up the word count, without thinking too far ahead or looking at it too closely. Plenty of time for that later.

(A side note - my advisor told me that there is a man in the Zoology department whose area of specialty is rabbit legs. Rabbit legs? So there are other people out there who are world experts on, I don't know, rabbit spleens? Also, is he a world expert on all the rabbit's legs, or just one of them - say, the front left? Just shows you can become a renowned expert on just about anything.)