Today was an excellent financial day. I got a check! Unexpectedly! How cool can life get?

It came from the Royal Historical Society, as a grant to cover my travel/photocopy costs for the Vienna trip. I'd applied a couple of months ago, given up, and assumed that I should take their silence as a rejection. I was so startled when the check fell out of their letter, today, that I just started laughing. Then I called Patrick and celebrated like mad. (My university library gave me the other grant, which was generous but not, sadly, large enough to cover the plane tickets as well as the hotel, food costs, and photocopies. So we went into debt for the trip--and can now pay it off!) Yay RHS!

I got a haircut today (before coming home to find out the good news), but since everyone else in the online journalling community also seems to have gotten a haircut in the past few days, I won't write much about it here. I'd hate to feel too much like a clone.... :)

Meanwhile, Masks and Shadows is beginning to climax, which is terrifying--I'm juggling so many characters and plot threads, and I'm constantly certain that I'll drop them all if I just lose focus for a moment....

Ah well. It's 85,500 words so far, by line/page count (or 67,300 by Microsoft Word's count). That means only twenty or thirty more lattes to drink before this draft comes to an end....