serenity

The ambient/trance song playing on my Pandora right now is 'Serenity'. This is ironic because I just read a comment that someone left on a blog post that I wrote during the Olympics -- and they seem to be even more obsessed/crazy than I am. You can read it here, but basically the chick is all mad at me because I contended that NBC should have stopped focusing so much of their prime-time coverage (via constant replays of every single one of Phelps' finals) on Michael Phelps after he was done with his quest for gold. Whatevs. I loved watching him swim, and yes, I watched him in Athens as well, and I'm of course looking forward to seeing what he does in London in 2012, but what I took umbrage at was *not* the fact that they focused on him during the swimming events, but that NBC continued to play his events days after they were over, when there were other sports that didn't get covered at all. To be criticized for my lack of dedication/obsession with the Olympics is something that, if you know me, took me completely by surprise.

Anyway, today was an absolutely lovely day in the city of sin. I made quesadillas for breakfast -- these are a holdover from my happy memories of endless weekend brunches in college, when I usually ate quesadillas while sitting in the dining room for several hours and chatting with everyone who cycled through. While there was no one here to keep me company, I must say that the quesadillas themselves were much better. Then I did the dishes, took a shower, and eventually made it out the door, down the block, and into my surly neighborhood Starbucks.

I worked on the book for a couple of hours, editing two more chapters while sipping an iced latte and people-watching -- my neighborhood may be strange, but that makes for some excellent people-watching, particularly if you like hipsters and toothless meth addicts. Then I came home and talked to my mom for awhile before venturing out again to pick up groceries. Whole Foods was expensive, as usual, but I'm excited about my purchases -- particularly the peaches, since I rediscovered them last week, as well as some applesauce, frozen enchiladas, and ingredients for more quesadillas. When I got home, I made myself a sandwich (with sprouts! I'm so Californian) and relaxed a little bit before working on the book until now.

My project for the past couple of hours was to go through the ~200 pages that I've currently polished for the second draft and start to write a synopsis of them -- not a polished, submittable synopsis, but rather a thorough outline showing key points, characters, settings, points of view, and page numbers for each chapter. I'm trying to make sure that the point of view (hereafter referred to as POV) switches make sense and aren't too frequent. Common wisdom says that each scene should stick with a single POV -- for instance, the opening scene between Amelia and her friend Madeleine should be entirely in Amelia's point of view, while the next scene could switch to someone else as long as it stays there for the duration of the scene. And for the most part, I've stuck to that and believe it makes sense. Where I'm struggling, though, is with the critical moments in the story -- like when Malcolm and Amelia first meet, or when they're exchanging their vows, or when they're "getting physical" (although clearly not while listening to Olivia Newton-John, since she came about 170 years too late). In those moments, when their feelings are evolving rapidly, it feels right to switch between their POVs in the same scene, so I'm playing around with it to see what I feel comfortable with. I need to go back and read some of my favorite first-meeting or first-sexy-times scenes to see how other authors have handled this, but that's a project for another night.

Unfortunately I suppose I should go to bed; tomorrow is a work day, which means I have to set the novel aside for the whole day and focus on other people's business. That's actually kind of nice -- as I said before, my job gives me a break from the book and my book gives me a break from the job, and so far it's all balancing quite well. Whether that continues as my job picks up or as the days get shorter remains to be seen, but for now, I'm quite satisfied.