The best thing about this weekend is that--defying all laws of probability--it's lasting 5 full days. Yay for university workplaces! Monday is Bank Holiday, Friday was--oh, Centenary Day, maybe, at the university?--and Tuesday is an extra free day off granted to all university employees for no particular reason that I know of. So we have a long, long weekend, and we've been amazingly productive. Bizaarely for us, we've been cleaning the house (my writing desk is clear! it's almost unheard of!), taking care of long-term, overdue obligations (at last, I've paid off the Austrian National Library for my photocopies of 18th-century scores--they can call off the hit squads now), and finally, finally, writing out wedding gift thank-you cards (the final frontier). It's amazingly satisfying to get all this stuff off our shoulders. Kind of like...freedom. Wow. No more guilt! (Well, not until next week, I suppose...)

I've also been working hard on revising Masks and Shadows. I'm on my second read-through, which equals my first real stab at revision. I'm doing lots of first-draft work now, inserting all-new scenes and character developments, and it's scary but quite fun. I love these characters, and I love getting to return to them and their world. My goal is to get this draft (Version 1.1??) finished by the middle of September, and then look hopefully around for critiquers--any hardy souls who are willing to read and comment on an (estimated) 85,000 word historical fantasy novel. Maybe I could offer chocolates?

I also started a new short story, just for fun. We'll see how it goes....

It's been an all-Indian couple of weeks in our kitchen, since we spent last week eating the remnants of the Indian buffet from our wedding reception, and then this past week I cooked Matar Panir, and Patrick cooked a luscious Mung Dal soup last night. We just finished eating the leftovers for a late lunch, and we're contemplating a wild and radical idea--a non-Indian dinner! Whoa.... The fact that the North African Couscous Paella (from The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home) only takes 20 minutes to cook does have a certain illicit appeal....