Mm. It’s 9:27 a.m. as I type this, half an hour before I’m due in at work. I rode into town with Patrick early this morning, so that I could have an extra hour of writing today. I’ve been feeling so frustrated with myself lately for the stop-and-start jerkiness of my writing practice that it feels like heaven to get some extra time. So far, I’ve done a first large-scale revision to my new short-short, “Paying the Witch”, and done a bit more work on Chapter Seven of Congress. Unfortunately, I left the handwritten rough draft of Chapter Seven’s ending at home this morning (normal disorganization meeting tiredness and hayfever and resulting in chaos), but oh well. It’s still been a much more productive morning than I’d expected.

In the best family news of the past couple of days, last night our friend Justina got Nika a Minnendrake from Ikea! I have to say, this is the coolest toy ever--and if we didn’t have Nika, I might well have wanted a Minnendrake for myself. They’re big (five-foot-long, maybe?) green dragons, with flappy wings and the coolest happy snarly faces. Nika loved her Minnendrake at first sight. When we pulled it out of the bag, her whole face lit up and her ears shot high into the air with excitement. She leapt across the room to pounce on the Minnendrake and then began to fling it around (it’s quite a lot larger and longer than she is!), wrestling it into total submission. Border Collie Heaven. :)

In other news, and to nobody’s surprise, I really, really enjoyed Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness and can’t wait until the second book in the trilogy comes out. Yay for fun YA novels!