Guess what I did last night?

Answer? Not a damned thing. It was the weirdest thing–a shipment of books I ordered when I was high (or, well, exhausted) arrived, and I… I…

I don’t remember. I think my sposta broke again, because of all the things I was sposta be doing right then, I ended up reading instead. I also ended up going to bed an hour early.

I woke up this morning and wondered who that crazy person had been who’d been getting by on four and a half hours of sleep a night had been.

My husband whom I love has had a number of ‘boys night outs’ in the last month or so. I was sposta have one on Saturday, but by then, I could feel myself come unglued–I got into a skirmish on one of the amazon.com forums (and you guys know I have soundly sworn off of doing that!) and I was disoriented and goofy and tearful… in short, I was exhausted–too tired to drive, really, and I haven’t felt that way since college.

So last night was sort of a ‘mom’s night out’, except I was in. I was making dinner and reading and Big T (who has been REALLY CLINGY for 6′ 4″ of seventeen year old male–aren’t they supposed to hate us enough to leave us alone by now?) came up to discuss irony, satire, geometry, comic observations, Adam Sandler and the nature of his disability on his strengths as a screenplay writer (and if you think I’m making up these conversations you haven’t been paying attention when I talk about this kid… he just walked into my kitchen while he’s SPOSTA be asleep and started quoting Hamlet. Out of context.) Anyway, he tried to start another conversation with me, and I just looked at him with the burning cinders that were sitting where my eyes should have been and said, “Mom’s not here right now. Please leave a message or call again tomorrow.” He opened and closed his mouth a few times (with, blessedly, no sound coming out) and turned and left me alone. But see? If that doesn’t SCREAM “mama needs some time in her own damned head” I don’t know what does.

Anyway, I’m chipping away at the mystery project novella. It’s not really TOO much a mystery–what happened was this (if I haven’t explained it before–I may have.) Dreamspinner sent out a series of fairy-tale inspired pictures on the author e-mail and the first person who claimed a picture got to write a story FOR THAT PICTURE. I claimed a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ pic, (Because people? THAT’S MY STORY! Always has been, since my junior year in high school when I read Robin McKinley’s ‘Beauty’, and then Robin McKinley’s ‘Rose Daughter’ and then Disney came out with a little picture and… well… it’s my story. All my old friends from high school told me I was Belle because I liked to read and my father was a lunatic inventor and I said, “But I’m not that cute” and then they told me THAT made me Honor from the Robin McKinley book and I didn’t know what to say to that but… like I said. My story. MINE.) So, I started writing a contemporary version that I liked VERY much and will still finish, and then looked back and saw that it really needed to be a fairy tale. For a nanosecond i was gonna move the whole thing to Green’s Hill, but I’m having such a hard time marketing the Whim story and the Adrian story that I figured that might not be a good move on my part so I…

Wow. Damn. I’m so very pleased with what I have done. Fans of Robin McKinley will see some definite influence, but I’ve pulled some plot twists that are mine and mine alone. I hope it’s good enough for Elizabeth and Lynn at DSP when I’m done because both ladies are so patient with me. (I’m sort of like that weird metal ball in Men in Black–moments 4:08-5:00–you’ll see what I mean.)

Anyway– they deal with me and I feel like major headache # 3 on their roster. I’m starting to think about knitting them some socks w/rainbow sock yarn, just so they can feel like maybe there’s a reason to keep me around. But that’s what I’m working on right now. It features a man named Naef and a lion-god-beast-thing named Aerie-Smith and… well… let’s just say they have a particular relationship–and it’s been a whole lot of fun and angst to write.

Oh yeah… and you all remember when my relationship w/DSP started? I told you I had two stories that were come out in an anthology? Is anybody Curious about that at all? Because I’m here to tell you, it will be out at the end of April. A caution to my LG or BMoon fans– one of those stories is STILL the dirtiest thing I’ve ever written. Not for the squeamish or those who barely tolerate m/m for the sake of the LG universe–just be warned.

OH– and some lingering cuteness from the last two days– Zoomboy’s been on a tear.

Today, he came stabbing at me with an imaginary spear. “Mom! Watch out! I’m a cave man. Cave mans and man-MOTHS lived at the same time. That’s fact. Cave mans and dinosaurs didn’t live in the same time. That’s FICITON. So I’m a cave man and I have a spear and you’re a man-MOTH and I’m going to stab you. You die now.” (I die.) “And now I eat you. YOu will taste good when cooked on the fire.”

So that’s mom… the man-MOTH who tastes good when cooked on an open flame.

And then, a little later, we got hit with a hail storm. We were all standing in the living room, gazing out at the back yard and the bouncing ice-pebbles, and he was dancing around in his excitement. Seems his class just did a thing on the water cycle, and he got a chance to use a new word.

“Mom! Mom! Look! That’s PRECIPITATION!” Why yes. Yes it was PRECIPITATION! But most of the rest of us call it hail.