I haven't posted much this week because I've felt in limbo about a number of things. Waiting to hear back from one set of people to know whether I should send stuff off to a second set of people, trying to prepare backup plans if that doesn't work out...yeah, I know I'm being vague. The point is, I haven't done much except sit around worrying about what I might or might not do in the future. Which is silly. So I'm hereby declaring a moratorium on all that and focusing on the present moment, like all the self-help books say we ought to do all the time.

What I've done in the meantime to distract myself:

installed Skype on my laptop. Woot! Patrick and I have had many a conversation through our computers...usually from different parts of our house. No, it's not a big house. But hey...when you were a kid, didn't you love walkie-talkies? even though the kind of walkie-talkies sold for kids only stretched about 20 feet in either direction? :)

watched the first 3 episodes of Torchwood and was really pleasantly surprised. I was totally prepared, based on reviews I'd read & heard, not to think much of this show. So far, though, I really like it. Who knows - maybe it goes downhill later in the season? For the moment, though, it's just really fun science fiction with interestingly flawed characters. It's very, very different from Doctor Who - maybe that's what led to some of the hostility about it from Who fans, who wanted more of the same? (Of course, I'm a major Who fan myself, so I shouldn't talk...but I'm really enjoying Torchwood in a completely different way from Who.) Oh well, I guess I shouldn't go out on too much of a limb before I've watched the rest of the season...but so far, it's a lot of fun.

listened to Within Temptation's new CD The Heart of Everything. One of the big surprises to me in the past year or so was the discovery that I love goth metal. This is something I would never have discovered if I hadn't met Patrick. When we met, we realized our musical tastes were mostly dissimilar: I loved opera, he loved heavy metal...we sighed and agreed to listen politely to each other's music. Then we discovered goth metal, which is big and lushly operatic, with (often classically-trained-)women's voices soaring on top, and tada! A mutual musical love was born. I wrote the rough draft of Congress of Shadows almost completely to the soundtrack of Evanescence's Fallen, and listening to any Nightwish album is enough to put me in a great writing mood. It's the kind of thing I never would have predicted after going to a classical music conservatory and absorbing all the usual attitudes there, but it's been a wonderful discovery.

Now I'm going back to reading Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson, by Paula Byrne, a wonderful biography which just might be exactly what I need to crystallize my new novel idea...wish me luck!