Thanks so much to everybody for the comments and emails yesterday! They really helped. Now Nika's upstairs sleeping, I'm at the computer desk, and it's a normal morning. Which feels absolutely wonderful, after the scare we went through. Going through that--those sixteen hours when we thought Nika might have a life-threatening condition, coming out of the blue and slamming right into our family--was just terrifying. It made me realize how many things I take for granted--well, and I have to, to get things done. If we all sat around and thought of the terrible, unlikely things that might happen to us--airplanes crashing into the ground by the house, etc.,etc.--we'd all just sit around shivering and screaming. But when something like that brushes against your life, it definitely throws all the normal small-scale worries and neuroses into sharp relief.

So in other words, I'm going to stop whining quite so much about my novel rewrites.

For a brief summary: the prologue still sucks, I haven't thought of a good way to fix it, and I'm wondering whether I should just get rid of it, but then I'd need to come up with another tag for the beginning to signal: Hey! This is going to be a fantasy novel! Really! Just have some patience!

But I'm not obsessing about it in such a life-poisoning way anymore. It'll be fixed, eventually. And right now it doesn't seem to matter quite so much.

In the meantime, some links that distracted or cheered me while I was panicking yesterday and the night before:

Fake Romance Titles on Real Covers made Patrick and me both laugh immoderately (my favorite one is The Scarlet Imposter, for the tag line that goes with it...)

and on a witty, snarky note of righteous ire, I really enjoyed Jennifer Weiner's takedown of the lit-fic/chick-lit dichotomy.