Yay! Today's writing session finally marked an escape from The Dreaded Trudge. Yesterday, it took me 2-1/2 hours of grim desperation to force out my 1,000 words. Today I wrote a bit more than my required 1,000 words (finishing up Chapter Nine) within about 35 very happy minutes. Kat's at her very first grown-up dinner party, and she gets to talk about highwaymen (or at least listen to inane upper-class twits talk about them), which is of course my very favorite kind of scene to write. Patrick said the scene made him happy because it reminded him of watching Jane Austen movies, which is exactly the kind of compliment I like to hear. What a good husband. :)

Now I'm lying on the couch with Maya snuggled up against my legs, which is a compromise on her part - she really wanted to be in her favorite position, which is curled up into a ball on top of my chest, pinning down both my arms so I can't read or type and have no choice but to *Focus On the Dog*! Maybe later in the day I'll give in and make her happy...

In other dog news, I've gotten completely addicted to The Daily Puppy, and yesterday's Daily Grown-Up Puppy may be the sweetest combination of story and pictures ever...I love good rescue-dog stories, and of course I empathized with this one in many ways since we got Maya at about the same time last year and for very similar reasons, although thank God I don't think she was ever kept in such an abusive situation beforehand. I teared up in a good way when I read Evie's story. Also, it did make us wonder whether Maya ever had a litter of pups before we got her, since (without getting specific) there are some things about her body that reminded us of poor Evie, who'd been kept locked in a shed by her first owners for breeding, among other purposes. (God, people can be horrible to animals. Hearing stuff like that all the time is part of what makes it so good to read about the rescue stories and the happy endings.)

And in a similar vein, I've been reading Neil Gaiman's blog lately solely for his ongoing rescue dog story and pictures! So nice for a fabulous and successful author to be a genuinely nice guy and good person, too. Plus, his new dog is just beautiful.

And now I'll stop babbling about dogs (for the moment, at least!) and settle into reading Peter Dickinson's The Lively Dead, which just arrived in the mail this morning during breakfast. Yum...