Oof. I spent most of yesterday crashed out on the couch, compensating for the big test the day before. The good thing about CFS as an illness is that I can, when I really need to, nerve myself up for a big sustained chunk of effort. The bad thing is that afterwards...oh, I really pay for it! At least yesterday was warm and sunny, so Maya and I managed to spend an hour out in the field, soaking up sunshine (and, in her case, ripping into a stuffed pink dinosaur toy with ferocious glee). Today, I woke up to find a cloud of white obscuring the windows - intense fog from ground to sky, the kind I never saw until I came to England. Now that the fog's passed, it's a cooler, grayer day than we've had in weeks, but I'm feeling so much better today that I don't mind it too much. I think this is a sign of overall improvement - back in the worst of the illness, I would have stayed super-sick for days and days after a big exertion, whereas now it only seems to last 24 hours or so. So I just have to be very careful about what's worth it and what's not...

I had two pieces of good writing news in the last few days. I got my contributor's proofs for Grendelsong No. 2, due out on April 22nd, and I saw that my story "Crow" is already being advertised on the bottom of this month's issue of The Town Drunk! (The story itself is due out on May 1st.) So it's a good writing month all in all, and I'm happy. Better yet, I've still got a couple of short stories lined up to be published over the next year afterwards, so I don't have to start feeling paranoid yet about having used them all up! Which reminds me that I really, really need to get around to finally revising my story "Red Ribbons" - I think I've been procrastinating on that one partly because it's my current favorite of my unpublished stories, and having to sit down, face & fix the problems in it feels like having to have a difficult talk with your best friend - no fun, and there's the sneaking feeling that it would be easier just to pretend that the problems don't exist...at least with a story, the problems are unlikely to get worse over time! (Well, unless the mouse in our cupboard is sneaking onto the computer at night and changing all of my dialogue while snickering between its teeth...)

I'm in just the right mood for marking up manuscripts, though, because while we were in Bristol, I found a perfect pen - a Pilot V4 fountain pen. It's one of the cheapest fountain pens I've ever bought in my life (£2.45), it's completely unassuming plastic - and yet ironically, it's probably the most comfortable pen I've ever used! I don't understand it, but I'm thrilled.