Right now I'm sitting in our crowded kitchen with Nika while builders (and the plasterer, maybe? can't tell - just some enraged loud male voice joining into the mix) shout at each other in our living room. This isn't quite the peaceful writing environment I used to fantasize about having...

Oh well. Patrick and I are trying to stay with Nika as much as possible, because the steroids she's taking for her dermatomyositis are throwing up some pretty horrible side-effects at the moment. So today I went to work in the morning and now Patrick's working through the afternoon. It's kinda like practice for when we have kids someday.

One of the nicest things that happened this week was finding the preview page for Aeon Magazine, Issue No. 8, which includes my story Foxwoman. I love the illustration for my story! I can't wait for this to come out.

A friend asked me yesterday if I wanted to go with her to World Fantasy this year in Austin, and I am now wishing ooooohhhhh so badly that we had a bit more money so that I could say "Yes! Definitely!" with a clear conscience...I haven't quite decided yet. Sigh. Much agonizing to follow, no doubt. I've never been to a World Fantasy and would love to do it...but if I do, we'll have to pay for it with money that we would have otherwise been saving towards a joint trip to Sweden for novel research...so it's a really difficult issue.

I'm not going to worry too much about it this weekend, though. Monday is our 2-year wedding anniversary, so we're taking a long weekend and won't be back to work until Tuesday. Mmm... So far, we don't have many specific plans except to have a really great dinner on Monday night and hopefully get to beautiful York sometime this weekend, walk around the medieval city walls and maybe even catch a museum there. (So far we've only been to the Richard III museum inside the city walls, which was wonderfully quirky, fun, unashamedly biased and a real bargain at just £1 entrance fee, but I've been there twice now, so it's time for something different.)