Been quite busy the last couple of days and failed to find the time to post to the blog. Mostly I've been reading, critiquing, and working out the rewrite details for MSR, which are pretty significant. And yesterday was Dana's 9th birthday and we went to IHOP for dinner (she was intent on having the Who-cakes, which just looked nasty, but some kids just have iron stomachs). From us she got the boxed set of Spiderwick Chronicles (which I was finally able to find for a reasonable price on Amazon, which amounted to about $6 a book, which is half off the cover price) and from my mom she got a Harry Potter sheet and quilt set (my mom made the quilt herself from HP fabric she found on ebay, and it's really very nice. If I was a kid...oh, who am I kidding? I want a Harry Potter quilt too!:D). We're going to repaint and decorate Dana's room next week with Gryffindor colors and I bought a set of the movie posters to hang on the walls. It's time to change her room anyway. We'd decorated it with Winnie the Pooh when she was 2, with painted butterflies and bees on the walls and a wall paper boarder, but she's older now and her interests have changed (and thank god she's into Harry Potter because the alternative she was gunning for was to paint her room bright pink and decorate it with Barbie stuff. And the pink she was begging for would have burned out retinas with its brightness. But having gotten the sheet and quilt set from my mom, she's excited about the new plan and color scheme. I told her she could choose any of the house color schemes, except Hufflepuff--because I'm not going to paint any walls black--so she chose Gryffindor).

The plan for today is to do more reading and critiquing and continue work on the outline, if I have time. I'm quite behind on the reading over at LH and need to do at least 2 stories a day now in order to have everything done in time to vote.

No work done on the outline today, but I instead decided to spend the day getting caught up on my critiques at LH. I did three today and plan to do two tomorrow. I also noticed that I was down to 5 subs out at market so sent a couple out today, to Weird Tales and ASIM. I'm planning to send a couple more out by early next week, to F&SF and RoF.

I'm also giving serious consideration to going to WFC in Calgary this year. I've heard such good things about WFC, and it could be a chance to get to meet aliettedb (you are going, right? I didn't misread you on that?). I'll have to get a passport, of course, and I'd be going on my own, but hell, I went to Seattle for six weeks on my own so what's one weekend in Canada? Jeff and I haven't really discussed yet; I mentioned it briefly at dinner last night and I got the response I'd expected to get: concern about me going off to a foreign country on my own, but not a yes or no. I think I can pretty easily sway him. I don't want anyone mistaking that for overprotection though; my jaunt to Clarion West back in 2002 is the only time I've ever flown off somewhere on my own--I'm quite the home-body and never did any traveling without my brother when I was younger--so I too feel a certain trepidation about venturing out on my own. Pathetic, I know! But really, Canada does seem a good place to start broadening my travels outside the US.