So I'm knee-deep in rewrite madness, and it's a little scary. Last night I made some big sweeping structural changes to the first three chapters of Masks & Shadows. I think it's an improvement, structurally speaking...but in the short term, things are a little bumpy. I need to think really hard about how to smooth everything over and put transitions between scenes that didn't used to sit next to each other! (And their elbows are bumping into each other uncomfortably now...no, no, I give up on taking that metaphor any further!)

But I'm trying to hang onto the one sane mode of rewriting I know, which is to focus on what would make the book more fun (a nice creativity-inspiring question) as opposed to what would make it better (which completely paralyzes me with guilt and shame for how bad it must have been before...).

I'm still reading and loving Delia Sherman's The Porcelain Dove, BTW--anyone who loves historical fantasy Must Read It! So good. Yummy and frothy like French hot chocolate, but filled with all sorts of solid historical goodness.

And I am deep, deep into thesis research right now. This afternoon I'm heading in to the library to check out twenty new books (gasp, gurgle) on Gluck, Traetta, the various Iphigenia en Tauride operas and Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso. This stage of research is fun, because it's new, but it also feels like diving into the deep end of a swimming pool. Who knows how deep it'll be?

In the meantime, the best news of the week is that Patrick's story A Field Guide to Ugly Places is up now at Strange Horizons. Yay!