Well, the best piece of news is one that many of you may have already heard by now: Patrick sold his story "Lavender's Blue, Lavender's Green" to Realms of Fantasy! Hurray! There was much celebrating last night.

And in other good news, I'm about 6 pages into Chapter One of the Fun Novel (veryvery tentatively titled Shadow Dance). This puts the whole novel-so-far at about 11 pages, which is just over one percent of the hoped-for total...but if I let myself think about it that way too much, I would go so crazy that I'd never get any novels written!

Regardless, I'm really happy that the lunchtime writing sessions are mostly working out. I'd love to have more writing time in the day, but...that's for the heavenly future prospect of the Life Without Thesis.

And in less inspiring news, I realized this week that I'm going to be getting less thesis work done than I'd originally hoped, because I just can't do it every single day, especially on weekdays when I've just come home from work. I could do that 7-day plan if there was only a week or even a month's worth of work left to do..but my thesis needs a lot more than that. I would go crazy by the end of the month. Heck, I was going crazy by yesterday (my fourth night in a row of spending less than half an hour with Patrick and Nika). I can't live like that.

My new plan is to establish a live-able (rather than workaholic) schedule, which may well lead to the thesis finishing later than was originally planned...but which should protect me (emotionally) from the prospect of getting so frustrated and stressed and unhappy that I give up on the thesis altogether, which was starting to feel like a real possibility. If that means working only 3 weeknights, plus a couple of hours on weekends, and getting done in December instead of September...well, that's better than giving up in despair. So that's the new plan for the next few months, anyway.

As a result of that decision, I'm taking tonight off, and Patrick and I are leaving (in about 13 minutes) for an evening with two fantastic writer friends (both fantastic writers and fantastic friends), Justina Robson and Freda Warrington. We can only stay for an hour or so (because Nika was left for too long today, alas), but I'm really looking forward to it.

Happy weekend everybody!