I'm finally getting back on track with my writing and possibly with my life in general, although merely saying that is enough to jinx it all and ensure that things get even rockier. I had a pretty productive day on both the writing front and the friend front. I woke up of my own accord around 8:30 (after sleeping for almost ten hours), took a shower, and did a bit of work for the day job. I saw that I had a missed call from Vidius Chandicus, and so I called her back just in time to secure plans for a quick, immediate breakfast near her (formerly my) apartment. We had delicious bagels and caught up over some fairly bad coffee before she went down to the south bay, so that was quite nice.
After parting ways, I left my car in her garage and walked down to Union Square, where I spent a couple of delightful hours working on the romance novel in the cafe at Borders. I've decided to take a different approach with book two by meticulously outlining where I see the story going; luckily, Scrivener (the Mac writing software that I bought a couple of weeks ago) is a marvel for this, since it makes it easy to see the outline and tie it to real underlying text in the same easy-to-modify order. While I didn't do any actual writing that will make it into the book today, getting the existing draft into this meticulous, detailed outline form helped me to identify five or six scenes that were unnecessary and could slow down the pacing, so that alone is worth the time I've spent getting everything set up. Then again, it's never fun to lose 5000 or so words from your story, but since I would rather write a great romance novel than an easy one, I shall stick with it.
Following Borders, I met up with Irish Matt and we had a late lunch near Union Square. For once, I did not get hideously drunk with him; with the goal of writing later in mind, I limited myself to one glass of pinot grigio. It helped that we sat outdoors under a barrage of wind and pigeons, making for a less-than-ideal lounging experience. We followed it up with dessert at Max's Opera Cafe, which was totally delish even if I'm still nauseatingly full from the afternoon. It was lovely to see Matt; I don't see him nearly as much now that our travel budgets have been cut and we're not working on the same teams, but he's coming back in November and so hopefully I will see him then.
When I got home, I procrastinated some, outlined, procrastinated some more, and repeated that cycle until now. Tomorrow is another day, and I intend to continue slogging on the outline; the easy part of the outline is done, since I've mostly outlined what I already had (although I have quite a few notes about what I would change in the first draft based on the outline), but now I really need to get a fully-functioning outline for the unwritten part of the book as well. Wish me luck -- it's time for bed!
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