It's raining outside, a gray constant downpour. I spent this morning listening to Judy Collins sing Leonard Cohen songs (mm, "1000 Kisses Deep", lovely) and then Andreas Scholl sing Renaissance English lutesongs. And somehow, oh-so-surprisingly, it's all left me feeling...wistful.

Time to listen to some upbeat music. Maybe Kirsty MacColl's Tropical Brainstorm - it's hard not to feel cheered up by "In These Shoes".

It's a bit late in the month for this, but I just discovered the National Gallery's lovely Advent Calendar - enjoy! I have an advent calendar myself for the first time in years - when I saw there were Lindt chocolate advent calendars at the grocery store last month, I couldn't resist... (and Patrick very kindly hunted through the whole store to find them for me after I'd spotted a woman with two of them in her cart. I didn't quite have the nerve to just stop her and ask - or snatch...)

The best thing I did yesterday was to finally - finally! - start the new(-est) rewrite of Chapter One of Congress of Shadows - the first version where I'm genuinely rewriting from scratch (terrifying but necessary). I wrote two pages, felt dissatisfied, read them to Patrick, and he pointed out that the first page worked really well - it was only when I then went into a long info-dumpy summary section that things went a little flat. So I cut the second page and now have a first page that I'm happy with. So, if I can just repeat the process for about 19 more days, I may finally, finally have a new first chapter and therefore a whole novel draft I can live with for a while...

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PS: A question for Livejournal users: Yesterday I posted notifications of my new entries at my LiveJournal account. Then today, I realized that anybody who already uses the LiveJournal feed of this journal was going to get double-tagged. Now I'm not sure whether I should do the notifications or not. Any thoughts?