Last night was great. Patrick got home, we made dinner (well, he was the one who made the eventual dinner...long story...I also made a dinner, black bean soup, but since it turned out to be rock-hard, we decided to save it for tonight and give it a couple more hours of simmering before trying to eat it), and then we headed out to the new local Borders. We had a lovely time sitting on the big comfy couches in the cafe, drinking hot drinks and doing research--I was looking for a specific location for Music of the Stars, because I had an image in my head of the scenery and geography, but wasn't sure which part of Italy those corresponded to. Turns out Tuscany fit it just perfectly, and after spending an evening poring over pages of pictures and local-food descriptions, I'm really up for a research trip! :) We spent about an hour there, came back home, did one last email check just-for-the-heck-of-it--and Patrick had sold a story to Realms of Fantasy! Woohoo! That's his third sale to Realms, and his second to them just within the past year. "When the Dragon Falls" is a great story, too. I'm so proud of him, and I'm really looking forward to reading the story in print!

In my own writing news, I went back to Music of the Stars and finished Chapter Seven yesterday. It's good to be back inside that novel--when I re-read the first six chapters, after my long time off for M&S revisions, I was so pleased to meet the characters again, remembering all over again how much I like them and care about what happens to them. I'm really hoping that this will be my most successful kids' novel so far. In any case, I'm having a lot of fun with it. (And if it ends up taking us to Tuscany someday, well then I'll be even more grateful to it! This morning on the bus I scanned the local paper for flight deals. £9 flights from Leeds to Venice...so who knows? Maybe someday there'll be a flight that crazy-cheap to Florence.)

So last night was really good, and it put me in just the right mood for the week ahead.