Friday, January 07, 2011

mirror mirror on the wall, who's the baddest of them all

I've been sleepy for the past seven hours, so it's probably time to give up and go to bed. This morning started much earlier than I would have liked, since I had a 9:30 training session with Alyssa -- nothing like getting back into the groove eighteen hours after landing in California. It was good to see her, and she was easy on me today; she also gave me a belated Christmas present of tea and biscotti, which was lovely. The gym was hopping today, since there was the post-New-Years influx of new members (apparently, the rush will die down when all those resolutions expire around the end of January). And as much as I hate to get up early, I asked Alyssa to switch me to 8am slots instead of noon slots -- if I train with her at noon, I don't get anything done beforehand, and then it's at least 2pm before I get back to any attempt to write. 8am may be brutal (to me, at least; probably not brutal to those of you getting up at five or six), but if it increases my chances for productivity, it's probably worth it.

After I worked out with Alyssa, I showered (yay for Kiehl's products again) and grabbed a salad in the gym's cafe. Then, I went on an odyssey to do a lot of laundry and failed; it took quite a bit of time to locate and sort all the laundry I wanted to do and load it into my car, but when I got to the laundromat, there were only enough machines to do two loads (rather than the five that I had taken with me). So, I prioritized clothing, leaving towels, sheets and coats for another day, and had a cup of Philz coffee and reviewed my manuscript while waiting for my laundry to finish. When I got home, I had just put my stuff away when Katie called, and so I caught up with her for the first time in an age.

Finally, I wound up my night with a sandwich at Cafe Borrone (which I adore so much that I went there tonight even though I already had plans to meet Tammy there tomorrow), where I wrote 750+ words of Madeleine and Ferguson's story. It's not a huge amount, but it's more than I had before, and I'm starting to feel my way through to the end again. I was distracted by the people around me more than usual, since one table had a fairly loud argument about custody/visitation rights between feuding parents (with their new partners both sitting by them in silent, awkward support) and another table sounded like a Duke alumna interviewing a prospective student regarding why he had applied. So, I finally threw in the towel and made the mistake of deciding to browse Kepler's, where I almost immediately bought two books - one was a book on the thoughts and beliefs of people in the medieval period, and another was a gorgeous two-volume, twelve-pound behemoth on the history of sculpture from antiquity to the present day. You can guess that both of these are purely for research of my 'gargoyle' young adult romance novels; the hero grew up in the middle ages, and I need to understand sculpture and identify possible locations in which to set my stories. So, between the two of them (and the thirty percent discount, which rendered Kepler's competitive with Amazon on price as well as on my desire to support local booksellers), I have to v. interesting reading to do as soon as I finish Madeleine and Ferguson's story.

But that story won't finish itself, and so I think it's time for me to hie myself off to bed. I intend to write a lot tomorrow before going up to the evil city for an epic dinner with some former coworkers -- so goodnight!

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