hold your breath and count to ten, start again, start again

Today was nearly perfect. I woke up, messed around the apartment, played with my eye makeup, and finally girded my loins (figuratively, as I don't know how to do it literally) for the walk through the Tenderloin down to Union Square and Yerba Buena Gardens. My first destination was Samovar, that tea place that I sometimes go to overlooking the gardens. I hadn't been there in several months, and they slightly changed the outside arrangement, decreasing the size of the patio and increasing the size of the tables. I sat outside, and it was absolutely gorgeous -- there were moments when I couldn't quite decide whether I would rather stare off into space, focus on my salmon quiche, or work on my brainstorm for Ferguson and Madeleine's story.

I spent an hour and a half there, enjoying some people watching (several of the groups on the patio were in town for some type of fancy food distributors' convention, so they were much pickier than I am) and drinking a pot of English breakfast tea followed by most of a mug of masala chai. I would have eventually finished the chai, even though the caffeine overload was starting to make me feel ill...but I got oddly booted by a Frenchman who came up to me and said that he and his friends would 'like very much to sit in the sun' and asked if I would mind sharing a corner of my [four-person] table with him and his other three friends. I said I would be done in five minutes and he just looked at me, then waved his friends over, and so I decided to leave. His friends looked a little bit appalled and the waitress looked very much appalled, but I was done anyway and preferred to have another reason to hate zee French.

After that, I wandered back in the general direction of Chinatown, stopping at my two favorite card shops on Grant before catching a bus back to my apartment. Before going home, I stopped at Staples to buy mailing labels and at the art supply store near my house to buy another notebook -- I need more paper like I need another shade of nail polish, but c'est la vie. Then I came home, vacuumed, procrastinated, and finally sat down to write.

I have officially broken ground on Madeleine and Ferguson's book. It was a little bit exciting to go through the process of setting the right margins and ensuring that Word stopped putting in 'smart quotes' and 'smart dashes' and all other 'smart' formatting things that could be bad for manuscript submission down the road. Then I typed the title (currently "Book 2 - Madeleine and Ferguson", although I expect to come up with something a bit snappier), and off I went. I ended up writing the whole first chapter, which was around 3000 words, in less than five hours. While I still have a lot of questions to answer and problems to resolve when it comes to the plot, I have a fairly decent feel for the characters since they were secondary characters in my first book, so I don't think I'll go through quite as much trial and error as I did with the last one. Or at least, I hope that's the case -- if I could write for two hours a day (recognizing that that's somewhat impossible but planning to make up for missed hours on the weekends), it would take me two months to get to the end of the first draft. That's much better than three years. So even if I fall off the wagon a little bit, I can't imagine this book will take as long as the last one.

So, it was a great day. Tomorrow I need to figure out what I'm feeding the friends who invited themselves over for dinner -- they're likely to get potato soup, but if I discover some culinary ambition in my dreams tonight, that may change. Now, though, it's time for bed, so that I can accomplish some stuff tomorrow before my guests show up. Goodnight!