Yet again, my Fame 'n Fortune contract has signally failed to arrive in the mail. Oh well. Apart from that, it's been a pretty good day. After our usual writing session in the cafe this morning, Patrick went to work, and I went grocery shopping, with a stop at Borders, where it turned out that not only was there a new Locus (with lots of pictures of our Clarion classmates!) but also a new The Third Alternative, with many cool-looking stories. (I only had time to read one of them, by Karen Fischler, but I really enjoyed that one.) And interviews with Ursula LeGuin and Robin McKinley--really, how could you go wrong? Sadly, £5 for a magazine is past my spending limit right now, but I plan several more trips to sit on the couches at Borders and gobble all the features up. (Unless, of course, there are Borders staffmembers reading this journal, who will then bar me from the door. Really--I do buy books, too! And magazines! Just...not as often as I'd like.)

I've reached a really scary point in my novel. I'm 3/5 of the way through, just at the point where I can see the ending way in the distance, when I squint--and I'm starting to panic about how I can possibly get all the way there from here. Aack. I'm coping with it by telling myself I really only need to know exactly what happens next...and if I can keep that up, on a day-to-day basis, I'll probably do just fine.

Meanwhile, I'm rushing around trying to fix up the last part of my Masquerade thesis chapter, and I'm running up against a big wall of personal ignorance about Ottoman political history. (Of course, the Viennese composers/writers in the 18th century knew just as little, and in some cases much less than I do--at least I don't [I hope] have as many bizarre and manifestly racist misconceptions about it as they did--but still, it's always good to be able to compare their representations of the Middle East with what was actually going on there at the time...) So I've spent the last hour hunting online for good historical maps of the Ottoman Empire through the 17th and 18th centuries. Quite fun, and also quite frustrating, as internet research so often is...I think I'm due for a trip to the university library this afternoon to fill up the gaps.

And of course, I'll keep checking my email, just in case that Fame 'n Fortune contract comes through....