I woke up at six-thirty this morning from a dream about a hideous yellow dressing gown and promptly started writing the first Kyle Murchison Booth story I've written in months.

Twelve hours and three thousand words later, I have a completed draft. Entitled, appropriately enough, "The Yellow Dressing Gown."

This is not even remotely what I was supposed to be doing today, but you know, it feels good.

And I have the whole evening for the work I'm supposed to be doing. We'll see how it goes.

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Publishers Weekly reviews The Mirador this week, and says very nice things about it. This makes up for the fact that someone on Amazon has tagged The Mirador as "bad writing" (me and Laurell K. Hamilton all the way, baby). Mélusine has similarly been tagged "awful book." The Virtu, conversely, has been tagged "perfection." Which sums up in a nutshell why I try to pay as little attention to Amazon as possible.

So help me, I just figured out the main plot arc of The Sidhe Tigers, the postcolonial literature of elves baseball novel.

This is indirectly elisem's fault, because Sidhe Tigers is her work, as is Engineering for Elves and Eating the Dark Flower, and last night she put up earrings called Elves in the Wheatfield Breakdown: a song for banjo, which I was not, alas, quick enough on the draw to bag. But it made me start thinking about The Sidhe Tigers again. And this morning I know things I didn't know last night.

The human protagonist is an African-American slugger named Marigold Dempsey. Last night I didn't know there was a human protagonist.

I don't really groove with the concept of Muses. What I think I have is Cats of Creativity. And one of them just dropped half a very dead vole on my foot.

The Second Son: 547 words

Reason for stopping: Need to know Mordred's Tube station. Also, go to bed already, dingbat.

Other work: Subbed a story. Scheduled doctor's appointments.

Other news: W. B. Yeats? Mad as a fish, my lovelies. Mad. As. A. Fish.

The Second Son: 301 words

Every word written is a good word. It may not be right, but it's still good.

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Muses resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain.
    --W. B. Yeats, quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: Perennial - HarperCollins Publishers, 2000).

The Second Son: 311 words

Not, you know, spectacular progress, but I will take what I can get.

AWBTWYSBD applies.

unexpected short story: 1,200 words

Chapter 2 of The Mirador: Ha, she said bitterly.

AWBTWYSBD.