Saturday, June 04, 2011

and she only reveals what she wants you to see

I was more productive today than I was yesterday, although I eked out victory by the skin of my teeth (and, more relevantly, a massive overdose of caffeine). I spent the morning dawdling and cleaning my house; it was already clean, but I wanted it sparkling because my landlord was coming over to see what needs to be done before he rents it out again. He wasn't here very long, as it turns out. The only thing that needs fixed is a blind in the kitchen that fell down very early on in my tenancy and that I never bothered to have fixed because I almost always left it wide open anyway. And the only other thing that needs done is clearing the leaves from the patio that I left untouched -- while my allergies are much better than they were in my youth, raking leaves would have left me coughing and wheezing for days, and I'd never needed the patio enough to overcome my aversion to breathlessness. But, he's going to do that himself on Sunday, and he'll likely show the place next week while it's still mostly done up with my (admittedly excellent) furniture and decorative elements. He seemed sad to see me go, but he's going to raise the rent and will refund me if he is able to rent it out before the end of the month, so that's a win-win for both of us.

After he left, I ran to Chipotle and grabbed some protein-y, v. late lunch (does 3pm still qualify as lunch?), then procrastinated far longer than I intended to, but I finally rallied myself and went to Stanford library to write for the evening. My writing is still going far slower than I would like, and I'm averaging half as many words per hour as I was during the endgame of Madeleine and Ferguson's story. But, I managed to write 2100 words of Ellie and Nick's story, including their explosive (if I do say so myself) first kiss after a decade apart. This story may well kill me, but at least I'm making progress. There's no way that I can have a rough draft done by the romance conference (which is less than a month away now - yikes), but I passed the 10,000-word mark, which means I'm approximately an 1/8th of the way through the rough draft (although my final draft will likely be ~90k). All I can do now is keep going, and I'm going to try my best to force myself to write even during the move process, since it would be way too easy to tell myself to spend the next month packing, moving, and unpacking without writing a single word.

I got back from Stanford sometime shortly after eleven, and now I should probably go to bed; I need to get up and fax/email the signed lease on the new place to my new landlords, and then I'm going up to the evil city to have brunch at Katrina's. Driving to the evil city should be a big ball of fun since we're in the midst of a weekend-long rainstorm, which is both highly unseasonal and highly unwelcome, but I shall survive. Goodnight!

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