This week is almost scary. Yesterday Patrick sold his story "Crab Apple" as a reprint to the French magazine Faeries. And today I just got an email saying I've sold my story "By the Light of the Dark" to GrendelSong, for its 3rd issue (due out September 2007).

Hurray! I am very, very happy. This story was my Christmas gift to Patrick, and I am so glad to have found it a home. (Patrick has written some wonderful stories as gifts for me--Five Things of Beauty, "Uncle Vernon's Lie", and a third one that he's just finished for my birthday--and it made me so happy to get them that I was determined to start writing gifts for him as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is my most unabashedly romantic short story ever.)

So we are very, very happy.

And a little bit nervous. We're not used to this kind of luck, gathered together in just a few days.

But I'm sending off a story tomorrow, fast, in hopes that this week's karma will hold!

***
This week I was also very brave, and ordered a copy of Sorcery and Cecilia, by Caroline Stevermer and Patricia Wrede. They're both authors I admire, and it's one of those books I've always meant to read but never have...and now that I'm in the middle of writing a YA Regency-era fantasy novel myself, I found myself terrified of reading it (but felt that I really ought to), just in case it turned out I was re-treading their ground or using too similar a plot, or, or, or... It arrived in the mail yesterday morning, and I picked it up with great trepidation.

By the end of the first page, I'd relaxed, because I realized it was nothing like my Kat by Moonlight. By the end of the second page, I was giggling out loud. By the end of the third page (and the first letter of the novel), I was completely and inescapably hooked. Of course, if you've read it, you'll know that it is exactly My Kind of Novel, and I absolutely loved it.

I can't believe it took me so long to read this one...