I have never, ever seen so much snow in Leeds! My Michigan heart is in heaven. The world outside the window is white and fairy-tale-beautiful, and I'm blissfully enjoying the feeling of having a real winter at last! If it weren't for the fact that we have to drive somewhere this morning, everything would be perfect. Unfortunately, Leeds - where it almost never snows - does not exactly have a crack team of snowplowers on call, so we'll be driving down mostly unplowed roads to the shop today. Eek.

I also woke up to see a couple of nice reviews of "The Andrassii Agreement", including a mention in Rich Horton's end-of-year summary for Lone Star Stories, so that was nice...especially because - total fangirl moment - Horton discussed my story right beside Nina Kiriki Hoffman's lovely Christmas story from the same issue. (Nina Kiriki Hoffman's The Thread That Binds the Bones was the novel that convinced me to go back to writing fantasy when I was in college and had been on a peer group-induced literary-writing kick for a long time. Getting published in the same issue of a magazine as her just fills me with fangirl glee!)

But the best part of this morning definitely came from a completely different source...although I didn't realize it at first. At 6:20 am, it became obvious that Mr Darcy was definitely Not Going Back To Sleep. Aaargh. Groaning, I dragged myself out of bed. Grumbling all the way, I pulled on a bathrobe, set up supplies for a diaper change, changed him, and then fell onto the couch with him, moaning, "I should be asleep right now!"...and he looked up at me with bright eyes and cooed something interrogative. "What's that?" I said. His face lit up with pleasure - I was talking back to him! He broke into really excited gurgling, grinning a beautiful grin of sheer delight as he talked and I responded. We had a 10-minute conversation, and we both absolutely loved it. And I was thrilled to be awake for it, after all. :)