It's been an exciting day. Last night I finished the Karina collage piece for workshop, and I'm tentatively happy with it. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and remembered why I like getting up that early -- the utter stillness and blackness of the night makes me want to write. I had forgotten; since I don't teach until 10:45 this semester, I'd been getting up around 7:30 and feeling like I had plenty of time to get things done before class. And it's true that I did, but having it be light outside somehow always made me feel like doing business-type stuff, rather than writing. I *can* write during the day, but it's easier if I start while it's still dark. I shouldn't forget these things. So I wrote a short story, about 3000 words, this morning -- "And Baby Makes Four" -- and sent it out to the readers' list and the EROS workshop. It's the first pure erotica I've written in a while; I wrote it specifically to submit to Best Bi Erotica II. Although calling it pure erotica is perhaps misleading, since there's perhaps two paragraphs of erotica amid many paragraphs of angst. :-) I suppose that's relatively typical of my stories, though.
Anyway, so that was very satisfying. I read a little Dorothy Sayers and then fell asleep on the couch around 8 a.m. Roshani called around 10 and woke me up; we talked for about an hour and a half, with me doing random household chores for most of it. (I've finally taken out the trash. Well, it's sitting at the top of the stairs, waiting to be taken down. But trust me, that's a vast improvement over spilling out of the trash cans and piling up on the kitchen counter.) Then I came back to my computer and puttered with various and sundry things, until just now, when I got the call from Sara telling me that contract negotiations are settled. I get a reasonable amount of money for _Bodies of Water_, I get some miniscule royalties this time (after we sell lots of copies), and my liability is a bit more protected than it used to be. Huzzah! I should be signing the contract within a week, sending it back to them, getting a check (which means I can actually pay my taxes, which is good, because it's hard to do all the things I do while hiding from the government), and putting out a call for submissions next week. (Technically, next week is Spring Break. In actual fact, next week is work-like-crazy-week, since I also need to make a whole bunch of phone calls for BW (the new acronym :-) *and* write a paper for Kathryn, which I'm dreading a bit.) Anyway, I need to get back to work, but I wanted to tell y'all the good news. I feel rather disconcerted today, what with the odd sleep schedule and still being a bit sick, but also very happy.