(no subject)

I am in bookish bliss. Chapters just delivered two packages this morning, one of which I was expecting and the other I definitely wasn't. In fact, when I opened Package #1 and saw that it already contained both of the books I ordered last week, but that I still had another package left to open, I immediately thought, "Oh no, they've sent me the same book twice!"

Nevertheless, I opened Package #2 just to make sure, and found an unexpected, delightful gift from an anonymous (but, I suspect, not too difficult to guess) benefactor. So now I can look forward to digging into:

The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning and Public Debate and
The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism, both by Phillip E. Johnson

and

Irresistible Forces, ed. Catherine Asaro and featuring a story by Lois McMaster Bujold ("Winterfair Gifts" at last! Yay!).

The jacket copy on the latter makes me want to curl up like a hedgehog and hide in sheer embarrassment, but I'm sure the stories themselves, or at least Bujold's story, will be worth reading.

Now I just have to decide which book I want to read first...

GIP!

Because jereeza drew this totally amazing picture of Snape and I just had to make it into an icon -- with her permission, of course.

The Snapelets Ride Again

In response to the overwhelming support for this scene on the poll I ran a couple of weeks ago, it's...

The Birthday Party
In which Malcolm's coming of age goes pear-shaped in several different ways, thanks to the involvement of Albion, Margot, Geoff Weasley, and a girl named Susannah.

If Margot were annoyed, she gave no sign of it. "You'll have to excuse my brother," she said. "Dropping broad hints that I'm a Dark sorceress with ambitions of world domination is one of his few amusements these days."

ETA: Please note that this is not a complete story in itself, but rather a scene from a much longer WiP, and goes along with the four earlier scenes from the same WiP that I've posted in the past.