For a look at just how much information you can convey in a mental passage before your protagonist delivers an actual response, here’s a revealing snippet from Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters: She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. “A few hundred,” she said. “How do you find the time?” he asked, gobsmacked. She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don’t spend hours flipping through cable complaining there’s nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pregame, in-game, and
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