This morning as I was working on my new short story (very tentatively titled "It's All About the Shoes"), I realized that something I had written without thinking much about it could easily be taken as a very silly joke reference to Kirsty MacColl's song "In These Shoes". It made me giggle, and of course, I'm now on a total Kirsty MacColl kick, even though I hadn't listened to any of her CDs for months before today. I'm listening to Tropical Brainstorm right now and feeling happy even though work stress (duedates! no time! requests for me to do extra work this week aaaack!) and ebbing self-confidence (4 fiction rejects in three days! Triple-aack!) both want to drag me down. I went jogging with a friend this morning, though, and it made me feel like I might have energy today after all, and as a comfort gift, one of my writer friends got me an awesome blue metal bookmark with little pink-and-blue jingly beads on the end. So, all in all, things are still looking up around here. And I can't wait for the weekend, even though it'll be full of cleaning, in preparation for guests. (Just to be clear on this one: Guests good. Cleaning bad!)

Last night I finished an absolutely awesome YA fantasy novel: Midnighters, by Scott Westerfeld. It's hip, fun, authentically teenage, exciting, and, occasionally, genuinely scary. The action scenes were to die for--I found myself bouncing in my seat as I read (not literally, because I was sitting in the desk at the front of a lecture theater as I read, while nervous students scribbled frantically away at an essay exam in front of me...but I was tempted to bounce, anyway), thinking: "Whoa...SO COOL!" Super-fun. Go find it! Read it! And best of all, it's the first in a trilogy. I can't wait to read the next one!