Yeah, so...

I'm 2 days into the revision. Still don't feel as if I've gone at it with a totally clear head, but I'm making progress, plugging along. It's totally absorbing, and I come out of it at the end of the day feeling blank and preoccupied. (And my eyesight gets perceptibly worse by the week, with this writing business, much worse than when I'm day-job working, on screens. So it's a choice between RSI and blindness. Snort.)

Went to see Howl's Moving Castle today. It was gorgeous to look at, and full of wonders, but not quite as full as Spirited Away. I was wanting to have my mind really blown open by it, but it wasn't, really. But, you know, if Miyazaki was interested in making one of my stories into a movie, I'd still hardly hum and haw at all...

As well as getting his driver's licence this week, our older son Jack graduated from high school. Only exams to go now and he's loosed on the world. Sheesh. One of those turning-point weeks that looks so ordinary and feels so strange.

I finished Rose Tremain's The Colour and broke my rule about not reading spec-fic while writing spec-fic by starting American Gods. Also got Garth Nix's Across the Wall and Margaret Atwood's Curious Pursuits out of the library, and resisted also borrowing Marina Warner's No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock.

Also BOUGHT Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness and Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters so I can look them in the eye when they get back at the end of the year. Weirdly enough, Midnighters was recommended to me by, among other people, a friend of Scott's mother-in-law. We had stopped to chat because we both used to have boys at the same school; turns out she used to work with Justine's mum. Tiny, tiny world.

Better go and rest my eyes now.