Good News All Around

Well for starters, I'm an aunt again for the fourth time. Baby Magdalynn Faith was born at 8:21 yesterday morning at 6 lb and 13 oz. Not sure on the spelling of the first name. It's a combo of Magda, which is an old family name, and Lynn after my middle name, but not sure how she's putting it together yet. I'm going over to see my sister and the baby tonight. They'll be in there for a few days where it was a c-section. So now I have two nephews and two nieces.

In other good news, I finished the paperwork on my mortgage renewal and refinance and now I am debt free. Big, huge, honking sigh of relief. I kept waiting for something to go wrong, for the bank to reject me or the money gods to laugh uproariously and screw things up, but no, everything went fine. Whew. I can't believe what an incredible relief that is not to have to worry about that anymore. I just added ten years to my life.

Writing-wise things are going well. I'm thinking I might do a two week stint of just writing flat out and getting as much of a rough first draft done as I can. I need a first draft to really get a feel for the characters and I want to finish this first draft by March 31st, so I need to put a push on. So if you don't hear from me on a regular basis for the next two weeks, you'll know I'm sitting on my couch with Alphie racking up the word count and trying to get to the first version of "the end".

I was going to enter Finding Home in the Merritt contest but I opted out. I didn't want to spend the money until I had the refinance done and now I've sort of run out of time to get it there before the deadline. However, there are a couple other contests coming up that I'm interested in for all three of my manuscripts, and I have to get 3 more agent queries out which I wanted to have done by end of this month. Missed the deadline on that one a bit, but if I can do it by mid-February I'll be happy.