Hooray! Today the mail brought me my contributor copy of Full Unit Hookup, Issue No. 9, which includes my flash fiction "How to Recognize a Dragon". This is one of those few, wonderful stories that came to me like a gift from the writing gods. I'd woken up far too early one morning, come grumbling and yawning downstairs to kill time until Patrick woke up...and then all of a sudden, the story flashed through me and took over my fingers, so that when Patrick did wake up an hour later, the story was already complete and ready to be read to him! I'm really happy to see it in print. You can order a copy of the magazine online if you're curious - this is the Last Issue Ever of Full Unit Hookup, and it has some great contributors, including Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft and Bruce Holland Rogers. So far, I've only had time to read a few of the other pieces in the issue, but I've enjoyed them all.

In other news, yesterday we were massively productive and hard-working on Important Baby Preparation Issues, which meant that we didn't do much of anything else. Sigh. Why, oh why does it always take at least 2 hours to get through any Mothercare shopping trip? This is true even when we only walk out with one baby hat at the end of it. And neither of us even likes going to Mothercare! It is a great mystery of nature. But, thank God, we now have a certifiably safe baby car seat that - miracle of miracles - actually fits our car, so I am happy. Whew.

I spent part of last week revising "Blue Joe" based on the excellent copyedits from Shimmer, so I'm hoping that that may come out in print fairly soon...and now I'm revising another short story for a different market (I'm not quite sure yet if this is officially a sale or not - I'll let you know when I find out!)...and I've just finished my first rewrite of the short story I wrote back in July, so that I can start submitting it soon...so it's been All Revision, All The Time around here, especially since the main thing percolating in the back of my brain throughout all of this is how I can revise Kat by Starlight's climactic scenes to adapt them to my new understanding of the Roman Baths' layout in the Regency era. It's all fun and absorbing, but I am definitely looking forward to writing something new again someday soon! We'll see...I've got lots of ideas simmering for the opening of Kat by Ghostlight, and I'm really looking forward to starting that.

And in the meantime, tomorrow night is our "Active Birth" class at the local hospital, and I just saw on the official letter this line: "Please feel free to bring along your own birth ball". It gave me a moment of utter panic. Birth ball? What birth ball? I don't have a birth ball. Was I supposed to have a birth ball? I even had a wild moment when I considered going back to Mothercare for another nightmarish 2-hour shopping session, just so that I could have a birth ball to bring!

Luckily, sanity took over shortly afterwards. I will indeed be going without a birth ball, and if all the other mothers-to-be look down their noses at me for my lack of preparation...well, I'm sure I'll have many parenting moments in the future that will be far more humiliating, so I will just consider it good practice!