I am slightly miffed, partially bemused, and generally surprised at how much I like living in the city. I have railed against this place to anyone who would listen -- and now I am living in one of the most 'city' parts of the entire city, and I'm happier than I have been in California in several years.
However, I think the verdict is still out on whether it is the city that is making me happy, or my amazing sense of focus on my writing in combination with the nice balance that I've found with my real job. After all, I barely went out this weekend; after my cosmopolitan-fueled Friday night, I spent yesterday and today mostly holed up in my apartment, with a break both days to go to the tea shop a couple of blocks away. But, the city does at least allow for more impromptu socializing -- both my Friday night misbehavior and the time I spent with Katrina this afternoon would not have happened on the peninsula.
I've made some great progress on the book over the past couple of weeks. Today I finally reached the end of my comprehensive editing -- I had been going through the book line by line to change both small things like word choice and large things like points of view in entire scenes, and I hit the end this afternoon. I then went back and made a list of what I need to do next -- specifically, I want to rewrite the beginning to make it tighter and get my hero and heroine together sooner, and there are a couple of scenes in the middle of the book that I haven't written yet. But overall, I'm getting very close to having something that I feel comfortable sharing, and I think my four-day birthday weekend will help me to make that final push.
I spent some quality time talking to my Uncle Mark, who called to ask a question about India, as well as my parents, who did not call because they expect me to call them on Sundays. I missed my dad last weekend during my usual call and the bastard never called me back, so today was our first conversation in two weeks, which was nice. It also got him out of cleaning the garage, so hopefully he was appropriately grateful.
Then, as mentioned above, I met Katrina at the tea place near my apartment, where we spent an hour and a half partially working. Since I was in no mood to start writing new scenes, this actually worked out very well; I spent the time reformatting my manuscript to fit actual publishing guidelines rather than my previously-lazy formatting, so it now looks like something I could send someplace as soon as it's complete. We continued our conversation over sushi, and managed to spend v. little time talking about work (even though we work at the same place -- but we met through external sources and aren't in the same department, which helps a lot). Instead, Katrina asked me questions about the romance novel, which was entertaining -- it's always fun to explain romance novels to someone who hasn't read them before, and I'm looking forward (with a mixture of amusement and dread) to the moment when I can share my published book with non-romance-reading friends. I shall stoically take whatever they throw at me, particularly since I am aware that a significant subset will either a) not read it at all, or b) skim for the sex scenes. Regardless, I shall persevere.
I suppose I should think about bed, since I have to be at work early tomorrow. I may stay up a bit longer, but I wanted to make sure that I blogged tonight -- I was a paragraph into a blog post last night when I fell asleep with the laptop in my lap, and when I woke up an hour later, I trashed the post and went to bed instead. Since you, gentle reader, no doubt look forward to briefly skimming these posts for mentions of yourself before moving on to another site, I couldn't do you the disservice of missing two nights in a row. Goodnight!
No comments:
Post a Comment