Hmm. Over the past several days, I can clearly remember seeing many things online that I intended to link to in my next journal entry. Now, of course, I've completely forgotten what they were. Ho hum...

It's been a nice lazy weekend. I hit the 60,000-word mark on Congress of Shadows back on Friday--woohoo!--and then didn't do any writing yesterday, because it was just a (gasp) Day Off from everything. I'd been getting so stressed and overwhelmed with all the pressures (self-inflicted or otherwise) that I've been feeling lately that I completely slumped yesterday, and did nothing at all that could be classified as work. Taking Nika for a walk was the biggest exertion, and since that meant getting to see Nika spin around the field in ecstatic circles of joy...well, that was just really nice.

And then last night Patrick and I watched "His Girl Friday", a wonderful old screwball comedy. The hero (Cary Grant) and heroine (Rosalind Russell) are completely unscrupulous and amoral, and it's just so much fun to watch them compete to out-maneuver each other and the rival newspapers, all the while that electricity is crackling between them like mad...I'd never seen Cary Grant in such a non-straight role before, and he was great at it, totally committed and hilariously wicked, even cackling in unholy glee at certain points. I love old screwball comedies, and I can't believe it took me so long to finally see this one.

Today, we'd been thinking of going into town, but--since downtown Leeds is a madhouse on weekends--I think we may just stay at home. I want to play my lovely alto recorder, do some writing in a non-pressured way, and maybe do some collaging for the next stage of the novel. Something nice that happened in my writing on Friday was that, for the first time in a long time, I got so excited about what was happening to the characters (everything coming together! all the secrets blasting out into the open! getting ready for the climax to the book!) that I actually stopped worrying about how slowly I've been writing it, how long it'll take to finish it, etc., etc. I just didn't care, for a while...and it felt good. So I'm going to work on reminding myself how much fun writing is, completely separate from my own career-oriented pressures, for a while.

Happy weekend, everybody!