I had the coolest possible (for me!) experience this morning: I got a private tour of the local opera house! Led around by a fellow PhD student who works there, I got to wander all through the TARDIS-like maze (the building looks so small from outside, and yet...) of the opera house, with its zillions of different staircases, hidden rehearsal rooms, offices, dressing rooms, wardrobes, rooms for art design and stage-set-painting, costume-making, tea-drinking... I'd been to the opera here as an audience member several times since I came to Leeds, but today, standing in the orchestra pit and looking up at the many tiers of seats and balconies, I got to experience it in an entirely new way. We walked through rehearsals of amazing singing for operas I'd never heard before. Coolest of all, there's a historical survey of the building being done right now to figure out the original designs, and evidence of that was spilling over everywhere as we walked around, with bits of Victorian wall-tiling visible in exposed patches beneath the 1960s flowered wallpaper. As an opera-lover, as a musician, as an opera historian, and as a writer of historical fiction, I was just in bliss. I'm still bubbling, as you can tell!

Knock on wood, I may even be able to do an internship there sometime this year. Now, if only a job would open up there in the next six months...

This morning I wrote three more pages of Chapter One of Thief of Souls and read them to Patrick before he left for work. He liked them--and I was pleased to find out that the freaky bit I'd thought up grossed him out as well! See, it's not just my weak stomach after all... An odd thing to be proud of, perhaps, but hey, it works for me. And I'm starting to have an awful lot of fun. :)