Bad Hoodoo

Today there was a terrible tragedy in the city of my birth.

On a tangentially related note, the hospital where I was born is celebrating its 100th birthday. No, our family isn't Adventist--Seventh-Day or any other day--but apparently they had inexpensive prenatal care and were near our house. A very odd and coincidental story about that: the first time my mom ever met my stepdad's youngest sister, Liz, she thought Liz seemed awfully familiar from somewhere. As it turned out, Liz had been one of the pharmacy nurses at Glendale Adventist Hospital. When we lived in Glendale (only till I was 2) we apparently lived on the same street, a few blocks away, from my stepdad and his family (who are, in part, Seventh-Day Adventist). But my mom and stepdad wouldn't meet until years later, when I was around nine and long after we had moved to Riverside. Fate works in mysterious ways.

Okay, enough procrastinating. Time to start tackling chapter 2 of my new YA novel. Yup, now that Olwen is out of the preliminary stage and into the revision stage (and the stage of sitting, in proposal form, on editors' desks for several months), it is important to distract myself from stressing about Olwen's fate by bringing another literary bundle into the world. And yes, I'm already on chapter 2, though I ought to confess that chapter 1 is only a page long.