An interesting day or two -- not only did I get my first novel advance in the mail, but Drew is making his first attempts at talking, and the sound he likes to make the most is... "da-da-da-da"!

Sure, he's just trying out new sounds, but I can at least pretend that he likes saying Dada, right? And you'd better believe I'm encouraging him like crazy to keep on saying it.

Next up for our little seven-month-old? "Mamamama." But there's no rush on that. (I'm joking! Just a joke!)

As for the novel advance, this marks the most amount of money I've made yet on my fiction. Very cool! And I must admit, it's been fun thinking about ways to spend it. I'm thinking most of it will be going towards getting the stuff we've been putting off buying for a while, like a nice video camera (anyone have some recommendations?) and other odds and ends. If there's money left over, I'd love to get some new Doc Martens boots. I don't really have a lot of stuff I want to buy.

For a while I was trying to swing it so we could make it to Tim and Heather's wedding in October, but tickets were too pricey, and my tiny advance would've been gone (and then some) with the price of a car rental and hotel. Sounds like that's going to be a cool event, and I'll be thinking about them on October the first...

And speaking of firsts, I'm done with the first chapter of the new novel, and made good progress on the second this morning. It's getting fun -- right now we've come across a tail-less salamander leading our four-year-old boy on a wild goose chase across the farm and into the strange forest to the north. Later!