The preliminary list of Wiscon participants just went up, and I got a totally immature but joyous thrill from seeing my name right after Emma Bull's. I mean, right after!!!! Okay, maybe I have to back-track a second and explain. Up until the age of 14, I thought I was going to write either straight historicals or Gothic romances when I grew up. Then I read Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and Saw The Light. Fantasy was suddenly the coolest genre in the world, to me, and it changed my life. (Of course, I also then spent about 6 years desperately trying to write contemporary fantasy Just Like Hers, which was a predictably disastrous mistake...but all the same.) So, as geeky as this is to admit, the mere web proximity made me enormously happy.

Of course, the only problem right now is that, among all the other stresses, etc., of the past few months, I completely forgot that I was going to lose the domain name for my website last week...and even after it happened, I put off taking time to figure out what to do about it. It was only yesterday that I realized various places (like Wiscon) had my stephanieburgis.co.uk email adress...and of course, my stephanieburgis.co.uk web address. Urk.

Luckily, today is a public holiday in the UK, so Patrick and I are both at home, so we've re-registered me. Sometime in the next week, all the links will start working again...and in the meantime, if anyone needs to email me and doesn't have my address, just use the one, the link on the left should work fine. (And my website's still up at http://pages.britishlibrary.net/stephanie.burgis.)

In other news, poor Nika's skin has been getting worse and worse, and antibiotics haven't helped, so yesterday morning we had to take her to the vets so that they could take skin scrapes and biopsies while putting her under general anesthesia. She's feeling pretty traumatized--not only is she in quite a bit of real pain now, but also just tons of discomfort, as the scrapes (a nice word for using a scalpel to cut away scabs) and biopsies were done on all four legs as well as her muzzle and between her eyes (!)...so she's covered with stitches and big raw bloody patches. Horrible. And of course, she desperately wants to lick everywhere to heal herself...and we can't let her. She's wearing an Elizabethan collar at night, with much unhappiness, but during the day we're just watching her closely (taking shifts at things like showers, internet-surfing, etc., so that someone can always have an eye on her). It's no fun for anybody. I really hope it all heals soon. :(