Blog Entry: Happy Thursday
Entry posted on January 7, 2010, 4.58 pm
Categories:
Babies, Maya, Publishing, Reading, Short Stories, Writing
It's been a bad last few days for many reasons, foremost among them that MrD has been sick. Nothing dangerous or unusual - just a normal combination of winter illnesses for toddlers - but as I'm rapidly learning, any time my baby is sick, life pretty much grinds to a halt until it's over. I didn't quite give up writing in the past few days, but my wordcount shrank very, very low, and for once, I couldn't make myself regret it. When my baby's sick, looking after him - and decompressing while he sleeps - really does cancel out all my other priorities.
But! Today the whole world is shiny and happy because he's feeling better. Yayyyyy! Everything feels happier and lighter now, and all my goals suddenly sound so much more do-able. So I thought I'd list some of the things that are making me particularly happy today:
1. For the first time since I moved to the UK 8-1/2 years ago, we have what I would call a real winter snowfall. We've got 4 inches in our little Welsh town, and Maya goes mad with joy every time we let her out. She does high bunny-hops through the drifts, bites off snowballs and even throws them for herself! Watching her makes me laugh and laugh and feel pure happiness. (Plus, snow just inherently makes me happy, even here in the UK where it also makes things deeply inconvenient, since there's no real set-up for dealing with it, and therefore the trains stop running, many of the roads don't get salted, etc., etc. I don't care! It's snow, and it feels like magic every single time I step outside.)
2. My friend Aliette's first book is being published in the UK and Australia TODAY, and I can't wait to read it. (I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon, and it still hasn't been dispatched. GRR. But still: book birthday!)
Aliette is a fabulous writer (she was nominated for the Campbell award for best new SF/F writer last year!), and this book sounds absolutely awesome - a smart, dark, historical fantasy/mystery for adults set in the Aztec empire. It won't be published in the US until September, but you can order it from Amazon.co.uk - it's a paperback, so not too expensive to buy internationally. (You can also order it from The Book Depository for free, world-wide shipping as soon as it's back in stock - it seems to have sold out there at the moment.)
You can go congratulate Aliette here, and you can also read the first three chapters of Servant of the Underworld on the blog My Favourite Books. (I probably would have bought the book even without this, because I have faith in Aliette's writing in any genre - but then I read Chapter One and pre-ordered immediately afterwards! :) Yay Aliette! Congratulations!
3. I just made a new short story sale! The story is called "Speaking English", and it's a YA ghost story about Croatian immigrants to America. It sold to an Australian anthology, Belong (an anthology of spec-fic stories about immigration), which is due to come out in April. So now I have even more reasons to look forward to that month!
4. And finally, reading the comments on the interview Ivana Mariç posted with me yesterday made me really, really happy. I can't even begin to express how amazing it feels to hear people I don't even know saying that they're looking forward to my book. That really is magic - there's no other word for it.
What about you guys? What's making you happy this week?