give my regards to soul and romance, they always did the best they could

I suddenly have a smashingly violent headache. I brought it on myself -- I did way too much work today, and the only time I left the building was at nine a.m. to run to Whole Foods for some milk, cheese, and more frozen enchiladas. Some vacation, right?

But, I'm quite pleased with myself, despite my aching head. Other than a quick videoconference from ten to eleven, I didn't do anything for my day job. I made myself a ridiculous lunch -- a tuna melt doesn't sound ridiculous, but it was just Midwestern enough (with the Miracle Whip and the homemade sweet pickles that my mom sent back with me over Christmas) to be an abomination in this, one of the great food capitals of the world, and just California enough (with the white albacore tuna packed in water and the English muffin instead of white bread) to not look anything like the tuna sandwiches of my childhood. It was totally delicious, though.

Then I made myself a huge pot of tea, kept it warm on the teapot warmer my parents gave me for Christmas, and sat down to write the story for tomorrow's class. I'm pretty happy with it, but it was kind of draining to write -- I was going for bleak, even though I didn't want to copy the post-apocalyptic theme of THE ROAD verbatim, and I somehow came up with an unrepentant anorexic who attempts to kill herself at the end of the story. So, I succeeded on the bleakness, even if I didn't succeed in matching Cormac McCarthy's amazing artistry. Perhaps I'll post the story tomorrow after class, but for now I want to leave it alone.

So that took several hours. I took a break to eat some popcorn and read the latest issue of the ROMANCE WRITERS REPORT, which is the Romance Writers of America magazine that I get with membership. Then, I got back to business and wrote the second assignment for class, which is a brief literary analysis of McCarthy's style. I didn't spend a ton of time on it because I had bigger fish to fry and I'm taking the class for fun, but I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's discussion.

I spent the rest of the night putting together the submission packet to send back to the agent who requested more material yesterday. As I mentioned, she wanted the first three chapters, a synopsis, and a market analysis. I already had the chapters and the synopsis, so that was just a matter of printing the stuff. But while I have thought a lot about the market that my book touches and how I might market it, I've never written any of it down. So, I spent an hour or two writing that, stewed over my cover letter for a bit, and then burned an absurd amount of time printing envelopes, labels, etc. and making sure that everything was perfectly straight and clean.

But now that's done, and I can mail it tomorrow after class. And other than a couple of short, pressing things for my day job, and the three hours I have to spend in class tomorrow, I have the rest of the weekend three to play around with Ferguson and Madeleine and see where they take me next. Yay.

Now, though, I think I'm going to watch some television -- I need to unwind before I go to bed. My subconscious listened to me last night when I asked for nightmares to fuel my short story; while none of them (that I remember) were about eating disorders, I did wake up at three a.m. with the vivid memory of a dream in which one of my lungs had collapsed and I was gasping for air. Weird. Goodnight, friends!