I have just submitted the proposal for the fourth Strongbox Chronicle, along with a seven-page document full of title ideas for the trilogy. Tonight, in celebration, I am going to watch the rest of season one La Femme Nikita while I eat the insanely-yummy-smelling soup that Ted is currently preparing. If I had made bread today, I would have a piece of yummy homemade bread while I did this. (Maybe I'll make biscuits or something. Or CORNBREAD. Except I have no cornmeal. *Damn*. Must remedy that.)

I am taking tomorrow off. I am going into Cork tomorrow; I am going to a movie; I am going to send my artist some money; I am going to do some shopping. This is how it will be. I am pleased.

I have not yet gotten the revisions for HEART OF STONE. This means I have the rest of April to work, guilt-free, on the Chance beatsheets and second script.

I find this *completely* astonishing.

I still have vague hopes of getting the HoS edits before the end of the month, so I can get them taken care of before I write HOUSE OF CARDS. I have this idea it'd be useful to know what Matrice said before I launch into that book. (Jenn, do you think getting you to nudge her would be more effective than nudging her myself has been?) Projected start date for HoC is either the 1st or the 8th, at the moment. If I get the beatsheets and the script done, I will have actually accomplished 3 of the 5 things that were on my schedule, and of the remaining two, one was the CAULDRON BORNE proposal, which wasn't really going to happen, and the other is HoS revisions, which I can't do until I get 'em, so.

On other topics: earlier today I was talking with lease, who watched "Supersize Me" last night, which led to me saying I hadn't eaten at McDonald's in a decade (not since my last year of college) and that I hadn't eaten at a fast food joint (excepting PizzaHut; does that count?) in at least one year, possibly two. I can't remember anymore. Anyway, lease was astonished, and perhaps moreso when I admitted I had eaten at McDonald's a countable number of times in my life. (I do not know the number. It is more than twenty, but not much more.)

This reminded me of aberdeen's students, growing up in the Bush, in villages of a few hundred, who are overwhelmed when they come into town and are brought to somewhere like McDonald's. They simply freeze, because there are *so many choices* they just don't know what to do.

Speaking from experience, you don't have to grow up in a village of 700 to have that happen. I was 11 the first time I went into a McDonald's (in Anchorage; there wasn't one in Kenai until I was about fourteen), and I flipped the hell out. I had *no idea* what to do. The people I was with (other junior high students) got impatient with me. I just stood there staring at the board in panic. Eventually I ordered a Big Mac, because it was the only thing I'd heard of (two all-beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun).

I did not like it at all.