Month: May 2012

Sunday on the sofa

Well, the title kind of says it all.

I’ve got exams to grade, and we have people coming over to dinner, but I just can’t seem to bestir myself towards productivity.  This is the second to the last week of Premier League soccer, so, naturally, most of the morning was spent on the sofa, huddled around the laptop cursing and screaming and drinking lots of tea.

It’s ridiculously beautiful out today and I did manage to go for a run–good thing, too, because I’d skipped out on my Wednesday cardio session.  So, I narrowly avoided having to write SHAME in huge block letters across my exercise chart.  Whew 😉  Seriously, though, the Healthy Me campaign is going great.  I’ve lost 3lbs so far, which might actually be too much too fast, so I’m in the happy position of being able to increase my calories rather than decrease them.  Sweet timing, since I’m making this for desert tonight.

Since I finished up the current draft of ABSENT earlier in the week, it’s time to turn to a new project while I wait for reader feedback and let things percolate.  Next on the docket is continuing to draft UNDER THE BRIDGE, a dark urban fantasy set in the Pacific Northwest.  I got encouragingly positive feedback (plus some great suggestions) on the first three chapters of this when I workshopped it in Dallas a few months ago, so I’m psyched to really dive in and hammer it out.  It’s all outlined and ready to go.  Stay tuned 🙂

Well, hope you are all having a pleasant Sunday with plenty of couch time.

Kisses!

A day made of awesome

So.  All sorts of exciting things happened around the Suri household in the last 24 hours.

First, I finally finished the second draft of ABSENT.  It needs a light edit, but it is DONE and should be in the hands of readers by the weekend — all of whom I fully expect to eviscerate it so I can put it back together again in the third draft.  Still, a momentous occasion and one I celebrated with a burger and milkshake.  As one does.

Second, I  just got word that my short story DISCARDED was awarded Honorable Mention in the 1st Quarter Writers of the Future contest, which is not as nice as winning but still quite nice 🙂

And, finally, in the category of Now it Can be Told, I’d also like to share the thrilling news that the upheaval has resolved itself in the best and most awesome way possible.  A few months back it became rather abruptly clear that my husband, Sid, was going to have to say goodbye to Yahoo! and seek his fortunes elsewhere.  This was sad because he had a really wonderful and productive four years there, loved his research team, and (depressingly) the search for a new job looked like it would take us away from our beloved NYC.

Well, it turns out that Sid and his colleagues at Yahoo! Research NYC are so deeply and fabulously fabulous that Microsoft decided to hire the lot of them and open a brand-new shiny lab in New York.  Just for them.  Because they are awesome.  The coolest thing about all of this, in my opinion, is that despite each member of the team having several quite tempting individual offers at other companies, they chose to turn them down and go, as a unit, to Microsoft.  Speaks to how special their collaboration is, and makes me so happy they’ll be able to continue it.  For those who are interested, here’s an article on the whole thing from the New York Times, and another from Microsoft themselves.  *beams with pride*

So, the title of the post really says it all:  it’s a day made of awesome.