Yesterday was good and bad for many reasons, most of which I will not go into. I will summarise it all by mentioning the following highlights:

~ I work with the best gang of people any woman could work with. Anyone who gives me loonies to put into a parking meter so that I can keep hanging around on my day off, simply because I slept horribly and felt cranky but didn’t want to be alone, is automatically nominated to demi-deity status in my world. Brenda, Tamu: you rock. And Dimitri, thanks for the tissues.

~ My husband finally got paid for the freelance work he did at Easter, which came right after I learned that my own little source of freelance income has indefinitely been put on hold, right on the verge of a nice new project to which I was looking forward to devoting ten to twenty hours a week. The gods taketh away, and the gods giveth.

~ I had chocolate mousse cake for dessert last night. Mmm.

~ And finally, at orchestra, I pulled off the Haydn with some sort of semi-capable style, and then proceeded to sight-read the Mozart with panache and 98% accuracy. Go me. For someone who hates Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and refuses to listen to it, I knew it pretty well. Then again, Mozart is so annoyingly perfect that I could have closed my eyes and played the cello line by prediction alone and still hit it dead on.

Looking at the writing I’ve been posting over at Owldaughter – Read, I’ve realised that I haven’t written short fiction in about eight years. As I’ll have more free time on my hands, I’ve decided to challenge myself to write one short story per week. I need to work on my ability to tell a story in 1,200 to 1,800 words alone. Besides, when I’ve finished a short story, it can be mailed off in submission somewhere, and maybe someday someone will even accept one.

At Tamu’s direction, I’ll also be working up a proposal for both my non-fiction work on alternative spirituality, as well as And By Many Other Names. I received a lecture on the necessity of selling oneself, a topic about which I’ve expressed my dismal and ineffectual flounderings before. She made it sound easier. Baby steps.

I see that I forgot to mention that I’m convinced the designs for the seagulls in Finding Nemo were lifted straight from Nick Park’s brain. Consider it done.

Phrase of the day about which to chortle: The obligation to tell long stories is more terrible than you might imagine. Even Scheherazade might stumble. And she was a far better word whore than I. From Caitlin R. Kiernan, of course.