Well, it’s official: I’ve caught the grandmother of all colds, probably spread to me via the air conditioning system. The only question now is how long the BF will survive without catching it 🙂

On the plus side, my books arrived today–I immediately lent the Alastair Reynolds to the BF, who needed reading for a train journey, and kept the Daniel Fox in my grubby little paws. Also made some progress in a new story, after a couple abortive starts–1500 words so far, aiming for 2,500 so should be done soon.

In the cooking experiment series, we bought fresh Chinese noodles yesterday, and I cooked them with cha lua (alias Vietnamese sausage/ham). Yummy. I love this; usually, I stick it in a sandwich or cook rice to go with it, but frying noodles, scallions and putting soy sauce on top of everything was pretty nice.

800 words today. I’ve successfully locked my main character in a room with a knife-wielding maniac, always a good recipe for success (well, for the story. The character’s chances must be lower). Darn, it feels good to be tormenting someone again. I haven’t been doing any first-drafting since Worldcon: I’ve done edits and copy edits, but haven’t actually started to write another story since then.

Tomorrow, celebrating the novel sale with my work colleagues: to that end, I’m making ham and goat-cheese cake. So far, the cake

• looks worryingly yellow
• has ballooned to an impressive size

(at least I know why the second point: I went a bit overboard on the baking soda…).

I’d post the recipe, but first I need to taste it.
EDIT: Matthieu pointed out that I’d screwed up with the oven’s settings, too, and that the thing was burning faster than it was baking. Sigh. Me, and cooking: 3 different people.

Hum, TGIF?

Tired. But it’s mostly good fatigue. I’ve spent a lot of time today doing writing things: I sent off the corrections on the Asimov’s story, and sent them out, wrote a bio for the same story and did the same (and forgot to mention the Campbell in it. *bangs head against wall*). Then there was novel-related stuff, which I probably can’t talk about in public–but it was good stuff, definitely. And submissions, though not enough of these.

I’m about two scenes into a new short, one that finally makes sense (after ditching three different beginnings. I seem to be doing that a lot lately). Brainstorming another one, though on the backburner.

I also updated my website with preorder information, just for the sheer heck of it.

Now I’ve done too much computing and my eyes are fried; I still have stuff to do, but I think it will wait until I feel a bit more rested…

And, in totally un-SF news, the BF has finished his PhD thesis today–all printed out and ready to be sent to the supervisory committee. It might be already sent, actually–I’m not sure what happened at the post office, but there’s still a copy lying on the dining room table. Yipee!
(he learnt last week that he was supposed to hand everything in by Thursday, which made for a very rough weekend…)