Excepting humans...currently in our household, living in northside Chicago, we are most frightened of...
mountain lions.

One was killed about a mile away from us, and another spotted after that just a few blocks to the west.

Of course, that's irrational fear.  A recent news story (unverified by me, but it sounds about right) mentioned that all of 19 people have been killed in the past 150 years by these cats, as opposed to 300 killed in the past 20 years by dogs.

We've got an eight week old baby and thus are prone to irrational fears at the moment.  Among the many moments I will remember of this year is my wife putting the baby in the stroller and turning to me to say, "It's not fair that I have to worry about mountain lions now."

Elizabeth Moon (Nebula Award for Best Novel, The Speed of Dark) has been posting a number of stimulating essays on her livejournal this week about story, plot, and critical interpolation (giving feedback). They are all worth reading, but I found the one linked to below particularly helpful in the suggestions it presents for obtaining useful feedback from writing workshops.

Helping your first/alpha/beta readers help you 

"You're turning red!"

"I can see veins sticking out in your forehead!"

"Is your head going to explode?"

These were the comments from my wife's fifth graders as she finished reading Kate DiCamillo's The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to them yesterday.   They were not quite the reactions Megan had anticipated.  

But Megan is pregnant and we're expecting our first child to be born any day now.  The end of the book triggered a huge emotional response in Megan that triggered a hormone surge and irregular contractions, which only settled down last night while she slept.  

She did manage to finish reading the story without crying, albeit with the other symptoms her class found so exciting.  The remaining copies of Because of Winn-Dixie were quickly snatched up from her class library and even the boys now want to finish reading The Tale of Despereaux.   Such is the power of china rabbits.

On the baby side, I'm trying to wrap things up at work in case I need to be at home for  the next two weeks.   I am lucky enough to have a job that gives dads two weeks of parental leave.  

On the writing side, I'm obviously getting ready to leave things alone for a while.   I do most of my writing on the bus ride back and forth from work.  I did a well-received reading of the book's first 54 pages at Twilight Tales on February 25th, implementing most of the suggested changes from the critiques it received at WindyCon34 and the Chicago Spec Fic Meetup.  It only took me about two months to figure out how to discard the double-flashback opening.   I was however distressed to find myself reading aloud that the horse still "shucked" its nose at something (poor horse).   While I've spent most of my time lately doing various writing exercises or critiques to improve my ability to edit my own work, I was so busy doing content re-writes before the reading that the much needed copy-edit proof was neglected.  Assuming I don't have too many more hidden "shucks," the book's pretty solid up to page 84 now.  The remaining scenes to be written or redrafted for the first section are clear in my head, and much improved from their first draft, and should put the book at about 30,000 words.   I look forward to getting back to them sometime in the future as a sleep-deprived dad.

Of course, now that I've bothered to blog this, the baby probably won't come for another week.   

EDIT: of course, it turns out, she was in labor.  She taught 5th grade all the next day (the 7th) when I wrote the above, and our son, Finn, was born the morning of March 8th. :)