It’s dark and dreary. I want it to rain. No, I mean really rain. If it rains then the husband comes home from the terraforming he does, and we get to go on a recon mission for the top-secret costume bits we need instead. (New phrase: “My husband is a terraforming engineer.” We like it and intend to use it until a better one comes along.) I will invoke rain by playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Note in my in-box this morning: “Oh, and happy mother’s day, cat-mama!” Very kind. My own little furry bratlings woke us up at an insane hour of the a.m. and didn’t care a smidgen about it. The flowers I got were from my in-laws’ garden.

On the menu today: Write. Correct homework and half-complete exams. Review Greco-Roman culture and religion for my lecture tonight. I just discovered two books on my shelves that I didn’t know I had: one on Greek art, and one on Roman art and architecture. Well, all right, I’m sure I knew at one point, but after several moves I had forgotten I owned them.

CURRENTLY READING:
Well, it’s another currently read-past-tense, actually. I just finished the new David Lodge book Thinks… and once again I’m all fired up about writing. Lodge tends to write what he knows – authors and professors – and I associate him with my thesis, so I’m excited about sitting down and producing text once more. Eventually readable, even. Possibly even publishable.

I go through stages where I know I’m good, then long stages where I look at the book industry I work in and think that it’s all futile anyway. Then I remember the thrill of idly flipping through the electronic card catalogue at the university and finding my thesis in not one, but three places. It’s real. It exists. It’s, well, good.

I also go through waves of fiction versus academic analysis. When I wrote for the local Pagan journal I reviewed books with a magical element to them, looked at the systems, the effects, the moral issues and so forth. It was a baby exercise, but it kept me sort of in form. Now I’m seriously considering doing something a little more serious and sending it out with a query to journals. You never know.