Christmas bliss, badger bandits, good news and good books
It was a lovely, lovely Christmas here in Wales. Even Baby X got excited, really trying to open his Christmas gifts himself. (He's enthusiastic and adept at the "grabbing" part, if not the actual unwrapping afterwards...) It's been a holiday full of wonderful family and lovely gifts, and also one of my absolute personal high points: MrD loves The Desperate Adventures of the Badger Bandits (and is already asking urgently about when he can expect Book 2 in the chapter book series)!
It is SO MUCH fun to write books for him! It could get extremely addictive. :)
(It was also fun to hear from my youngest brother that he'd just found, back in our family house, the picture book I wrote for him and our same-aged cousin back when I was 13 and they were 3. It's always been fun to write stories for family!)
Sadly, I haven't finished writing my brothers' Christmas short stories yet (oops) - but luckily, they haven't finished mine yet either, so we're all giving each other extended deadlines and letting Christmas stretch on a while longer.
And! I had really, really nice news last night: my short story "Clasp Hands" (I blogged about it back when I first-drafted it in October) has just sold to Daily Science Fiction! Yay! It was really perfectly-timed news for closing out the year. This is the story that really made me feel like a writer again for the first time since Baby X was born, so it means an extra lot to me to get it published. (My story "True Names", which was published in Strange Horizons, did the same thing for me after MrD was born! They really are both landmark stories for me in that way, even though they don't have much else in common.)
Later today, we'll be visiting with very beloved family members for the last of our post-Christmas get-togethers, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've had a quiet, restful Sunday morning, though, complete with a long time spent tucked up with Baby X while he napped and I read one of my favorite Christmas gifts, Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. (Thanks so much to Gwenda Bond for recommending it, and to my sister- and brother-in-law for getting it for me!)
Ursula Nordstrom was the editor for, it seems, almost every children's book I loved as a kid, and not only was she a fabulously witty and entertaining letter-writer, but I'm finding the letters incredibly inspirational as a writer. They're really worth reading, whether you're a writer yourself or whether you just want a really fascinating insight into the background of a lot of wonderful, classic children's books and how they changed along the way.
What about you guys? If you celebrate Christmas, did you get any books? And if you didn't celebrate, how did you spend your day/s off? I'd love to hear.
It is SO MUCH fun to write books for him! It could get extremely addictive. :)
(It was also fun to hear from my youngest brother that he'd just found, back in our family house, the picture book I wrote for him and our same-aged cousin back when I was 13 and they were 3. It's always been fun to write stories for family!)
Sadly, I haven't finished writing my brothers' Christmas short stories yet (oops) - but luckily, they haven't finished mine yet either, so we're all giving each other extended deadlines and letting Christmas stretch on a while longer.
And! I had really, really nice news last night: my short story "Clasp Hands" (I blogged about it back when I first-drafted it in October) has just sold to Daily Science Fiction! Yay! It was really perfectly-timed news for closing out the year. This is the story that really made me feel like a writer again for the first time since Baby X was born, so it means an extra lot to me to get it published. (My story "True Names", which was published in Strange Horizons, did the same thing for me after MrD was born! They really are both landmark stories for me in that way, even though they don't have much else in common.)
Later today, we'll be visiting with very beloved family members for the last of our post-Christmas get-togethers, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've had a quiet, restful Sunday morning, though, complete with a long time spent tucked up with Baby X while he napped and I read one of my favorite Christmas gifts, Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. (Thanks so much to Gwenda Bond for recommending it, and to my sister- and brother-in-law for getting it for me!)
Ursula Nordstrom was the editor for, it seems, almost every children's book I loved as a kid, and not only was she a fabulously witty and entertaining letter-writer, but I'm finding the letters incredibly inspirational as a writer. They're really worth reading, whether you're a writer yourself or whether you just want a really fascinating insight into the background of a lot of wonderful, classic children's books and how they changed along the way.
What about you guys? If you celebrate Christmas, did you get any books? And if you didn't celebrate, how did you spend your day/s off? I'd love to hear.