It's a gorgeous spring day, and all the animals in the neighborhood are loving it. When we took Maya out for a walk this morning, she spent ages sniffing every single daffodil we passed - if we hadn't insisted on bringing her back home, she'd still be there now, luxuriating in all the spring smells! There are four mother-foal pairs in the nearby field now, and two of the little foals were galloping around the field when we passed, looking wobbly and awkward but full of joy in their own newfound ability to run.

And since it is a new month, I got to make my monthly Amazon order, which is always one of my favorite monthly events. I'm really looking forward to finally getting Tim Pratt's Poison Sleep and also Lace and Blade, an anthology that looks like exactly my cup of tea. (Elegant romantic fantasy swashbucklers? Oh, yeah!) I had a nice arrival in the mail yesterday, too - a free copy of Sandra McDonald's The Outback Stars, which I won on her blog in exchange for a promise to review it, whether for good or ill, on my own blog when I finish it. I'm only fifty pages in so far, so I'm nowhere near ready to review it, but I will say that so far it's an awful lot of fun, and refreshingly different from any of the other books I've been reading lately.

Apart from that, there's not much news. I've had a couple of quiet, nice days, full of reading, Maya-cuddling, and putting the final polish on several stories that have been needing revision for far, far too long. With luck, the last of them should be heading out by the end of next week, which will feel great...and then I'll have absolutely no excuse to avoid writing the climax to Kat by Starlight! Fooey. I hate writing novel climaxes, because it means that the novels are DONE! (Well, done for a first draft value of "done", anyway. But first drafts are always my favorite to write, and I never want them to end!) Luckily, my short-story-revising break has been long enough now that I'm really missing Kat, so I'm actually looking forward to hitting that point, despite feeling wistful about nearing the end.

Ooh, and one very cool discovery I made yesterday: one of my very favorite British fantasy writers, Freda Warrington, has just started a blog on livejournal! Her novel The Court of the Midnight King is one of the most fun historical fantasies I've ever read, an alternate history Richard III novel full of magic and darkness and romance, and I was lucky enough to read an early draft of her contemporary fantasy novel Elfland, which is due out from Tor in 2009, and which is lushly-written, really original and totally lovely. Plus, she's a wonderful person as well as a wonderful writer. (Such a nice coincidence when both of those things happen to be true!) So: check out her new blog! :)