Eostre is the goddess of fertility and the Spring. People wonder what bunnies and painted eggs have to do with the Resurrection of Christ, forgetting that the holiday was originally a pagan one.

Had a nice day with my parents yesterday. Played with the Easter bunny, i.e. Neli, my parents' pet rabbit. We talked, ate, called my sister in New York, ate, played a cool board game, ate, called my grandmother in Illinois, and ate some more. Well, okay, we didn't eat that much, and we didn't have a typical Greek Easter with some animal roasting on a spit in our front yard. But we did have chicken cordon bleu, one of my top two favorite all-time dishes (the other one being chicken curry dwan), and it was delicious.

The Ten Commandments came on at 7 p.m., and since I'd never seen the whole thing before, I watched it with my parents. I left at 10:00, got home and watched it some more, finally turning off the TV at 11:45. That is one long damn movie. And good, though I was frankly more interested in Moses as a character before he goes up Mt. Sinai and talks to the burning bush. He was more interesting when he was struggling with his identity - Egyptian or Hebrew - than after he was filled with the word of God. Though maybe I'm examining it with a writer's perspective, looking for inner conflict and all that. Chuck was good in it as well, though the acting did get a bit over-the-top at times.

In writing news, I got two simultaneous rejections from Polyphony on Friday (oddly enough, the day before I got the second volume in the mail), followed by one from Strange Horizons the next morning, which made six rejections in nine days. Getting pummeled like that really starts to make you wonder what the hell you're doing, if you have any talent at all, if you'll ever get anywhere in this business. I admit, I wallowed in pity for a while. But then I looked at where I could send those stories next, and will be sending out five of them tomorrow (one I'll have to wait on, because the Say... anthology reading period doesn't start until June).

Through all that, I did manage to revise chapter two of the novel, and went down to Kinko's to make copies for my class. It reads much better than my first chapter, smoother, with a more consistent voice. I'm starting to get in the groove here, and I've decided not to write any new short stories until I've finished the novel, unless I absolutely have to get them out of my head. Since I'm going to be using the novel as my Master's thesis (hee hee!), I'm going to need to concentrate on it for the forseeable future.

No chocolate bunnies or marshmallow peeps this year, but that's probably for the best.

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Now Reading:
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

Stories Out to Publishers:
12

Books Read This Year:
17

Novel Word Count:
9200