Sorry about the whininess of that last entry. I went to bed at 7pm on Thursday, slept till 7:30 the next morning, and have been in a much more livable mood ever since. (Not stress-free, but an awful lot more tolerant and tolerable!) (Er, I hope that Patrick would agree with that last statement...always hard to tell from your own perspective. Oh well.)

I've been enjoying Justina's blog entries about her Clarion Writeathon progress, which are of course shaming me immensely since I haven't worked on my CoS rewrites since Monday (first sickness, then that just-for-fun new short story have distracted me)...today, though, we went out to Borders for breakfast at the cafe and I read some wonderfully guilty pleasure novels (Amanda Quick's The Paid Companion and Wait Until Midnight), which left me feeling much perkier about writing, for whatever reason. (Maybe just feeling that it might be fun, after all, to work on my romantic historical novel?) So I'm hoping to get some more written today. I need to insert a politicking/intriguing scene, conducted by the Emperor of Austria at a masked ball. I didn't feel like I had the energy for it earlier in the week, but now I'm feeling like it's the right moment to go for it. Time to make a strawberry/banana smoothie, put on one of my writing playlists and start typing...

Oh, and I forgot to mention that Patrick's put up a cool webpage for our story Fire Magic. You can see a picture of the magazine cover, too, which was based on our story. Very fun.