First, Mom said I needed to post a correction/addition. If you are crazy enough to try the horseradish in tomato juice sinus cure, she says you should heat the concoction before drinking -- I do a minute and a half to two minutes in the microwave. It's kind of gross cold, plus the warm liquid has benefits of its own. I usually use V8 juice instead of tomato juice. Maybe I've been influenced by their advertising, but I find I have more energy on days I drink it -- even without the prepared horseradish mixed in. The cure seems to have worked because the horrible pressure and headache are gone. I'm still sleeping with the vaporizer running, taking extra vitamin C and drinking plenty of liquids to hold off any future attacks.

It doesn't help that we seem to be having an actual winter this year. Usually, we just have a few days of really cold weather, but this is a real winter for this part of the world. We may even get more snow/ice/sleet this week. How is it that when I was writing about the Christmas season in New York around this time last year we had such an unseasonably warm winter, yet this year when the book I'm writing takes place in May I get cold weather? It can be hard to stay in the mood, and I have to keep mentally deleting the heavy coats I find myself picturing on my characters. Come to think of it, I have a bad habit of inserting details from my present life into my mental images of what I'm reading or writing. When I had knee surgery more than ten years ago, in every book I read as I recovered, I pictured all the major characters on crutches. I remember reading one scene where the heroine got mad about something and decided to walk home instead of sticking around and waiting for a ride, and I was in tears about how stubborn and brave she was to go all that way on crutches -- and then I realized that the character wasn't actually on crutches. That had just been the way I was picturing her because I was on crutches at the time (and on some really fun painkillers that probably had something to do with it).

Now, in other news, I got copies of Enchanted, Inc. in Korean today. The cover is really cute.


I got next to no work done over the weekend because I was strangely social, getting together with a couple of different groups of friends and catching up by phone with some friends and family. As a result, I'm probably a little more reclusive today and have a lot of extra work to get done. But, possibly thanks to that V8, I've actually been pretty efficient about getting things done. Of course, the really hard, time-consuming stuff is what's left on the to-do list. Little items like "revise a book." There may be some whimpering.

So, speaking of whimpering, it's time to get to work. (Whine, whine, moan) If you're dying for more sparks of brilliance from me today, there's a nice interview with me in the Rose and Thorn Literary E-Zine. That's probably more coherent than anything I can muster at the moment.