I don't know if the pills are already kicking in or if it's just my mood, but I am feeling so much better today. I'm listening to Pink Martini's "Hang on Little Tomato", surfing the web, and thinking about playing the recorder again. Woot!

(Pink Martini will be playing in London this Friday and Saturday! I won't be making it this time, but at least it's a positive sign that they do tour to the UK, so maybe I'll see them next year. This is the year of conflicting tours--Cecilia Bartoli, my favorite classical singer in the world, is singing in Manchester at the end of May, while we'll be in the US. Sigh.)

Great stuff online right now:

Meghan McCarron's The Flying Woman, at Strange Horizons

Poems by Edna St Vincent Millay, including some wonderful fantasy pieces like "Witch Wife". (Via Gwenda.)

Wonderful critiquing advice from Emma Bull, in her March 20th entry:

I've often seen the phrase "brutally honest" in discussions of writing critiques. In most of those discussions, it figures as a good thing. It seems to suggest that brutal honesty is more honest than honesty by itself.

"Honesty" means truth-telling. Like pregnancy, it's pretty much an all-or-nothing state. Supplementing it with brutality doesn't add more truth; it only adds pain. Truth delivered with a helping of pain is not more likely to be acted on. In fact, it turns the matter in question into a bruise, a place that hurts to touch, that gets protected from further contact. The person who needs to hear the truth is less likely to profit by brutal honesty than by honesty delivered with kindness and tact.

So true.

Now I'm going back to the couch to curl up with Nika, take some more pills, and finish re-reading Kate DiCamillo's wonderful book Because of Winn-Dixie, one of my favorite kids' books ever and such a perfect comfort read, especially for anyone who loves dogs. (And it's got a happy ending! Hurray for kids' dog books that don't end horribly. Someday I really want to read Gordon Korman's novel about that whole phenomenon, No More Dead Dogs. I love Gordon Korman's books, and my brothers both recommended this one, which is, as the Booklist review says, "one for every reader weary of being assigned novels in which the dog dies". My favorite quote from the Amazon excerpt: "Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on its cover. Trust me, that dog is going down." Luckily, this is not true of Winn-Dixie.)