Yesterday I woke up ridiculously early for a Sunday morning, at about 7 a.m., and I was inclined to feel resentful and bitter about it. I swallowed some painkillers (for the ailment that had woken me up in the first place) and decided to surf around the internet to distract myself until they kicked in. When I ran out of blog entries, etc., I decided to open up Strange Horizons and read stories randomly chosen from their full archive. Some of them were fantastic--I loved Sarah Prineas's Water, Green River, Daybreak, which I'd never read before, and (although I had, of course, read this one before) I also adored Patrick's Five Things of Beauty.

By the time I'd spent about forty minutes reading great stories, the painkillers had started to kick in, and better yet, my mind was buzzing with stimulation and new ideas. By the time Patrick and Nika woke up, I'd written a new short-short for Patrick, "How To Recognize a Dragon: A Primer for Beginners"! It made me really happy. I haven't written a short-short story since Inside the Tower, and I'd forgotten how much fun they are. And so satisfying, to be able to write a complete story in one sitting! It really made my day. Better yet, when I read it to Patrick, he liked it a lot, too. :) Now I'm trying to decide whether to read that or the first scene of my longer chick-lit fantasy story, "It's All About the Shoes", for my Wiscon reading. Hmm...

So yesterday was a good day, all in all. We went out to Borders and Patrick worked on rewrites for his awesome new YA novel, The Sleepers, while I wrote the first 3 pages of Chapter Six of Marrying a Demon, then treated myself by reading some of Laurel K. Hamilton's second Merrie Gentry novel. (Guilty fun, yes, but soooo much fun! I've given up my reservations and gotten addicted.) Then we came back home, took Nika for a walk, and took a ridiculous number of pictures with our newly-charged digital camera. Pictures of highlights and other objects soon to follow!

This afternoon I'm off to a training workshop on Web Authoring at the university, and before that I'm hoping to do both types of writing--fiction and thesis. Poor Nika is ill with a stomach bug, so she's snuggled into a tight ball on "her" chair, behind me, content, for once, for me to work away at the computer without giving her much attention. Poor puppy... We had to get up a couple of times in the middle of the night to take her outside, so I'm trying to peel my eyelids open as I write. Wish me luck!