Friday, July 23, 2010

all the vampires walking through the valley move west down ventura boulevard

Today was lovely, although it was a nonstop slog from the time I got to the office at 8am until the writing group that I hosted left around 9pm. I had to be 'on' the entire time I was at work, since I had meetings straight from 8am until 2:15pm. I did about an hour of work at my desk, then realized that I was going to be horribly behind schedule with my personal life, and so dashed out the door to grab some things at the grocery store before coming home and cleaning furiously. It was too late to unpack anything else, but I did clear off my kitchen table of all the hundreds of notes to myself about my romance novel, and I swiffered all the little wampdevils off the floor (although without Adit here to call my hair detritus 'wampdevils', is that what they are? and oddly, they don't accumulate here they way they did in our apartment, so perhaps moving out of his place has exorcised the wampdevils). Somewhere in there, I had a half-hour call with a friend of a friend who is applying for a job at my company; I don't know if I was particularly helpful, since I was distracted by dusting, but she seemed pleased enough.

By seven p.m., I had accomplished just enough that I wasn't totally embarrassed by my lack of unpacking. The writing group all showed up within ten minutes of each other. It's a bunch of students from that creative writing class that I took this winter, and they've been getting together once a month since the class ended. This is the first time I was able to make it, and since it was at my house I couldn't flake at the last moment -- good strategy, right? The same people don't come every time, but tonight four of them came, and we workshopped two stories. They were both excellent; one was a standalone story that I thought was publishable and wonderful (not always the same thing) with minor edits, and the other was a chapter in an ongoing book-length story that will need a lot of additional writing to get to the end of, but the woman is working with a really fascinating historical setting and storyline (based on a Frenchman in colonial India). And, we had a really good discussion about balancing historical accuracy with the expectations/beliefs of modern readers -- in this case, about a guy acquiring a ten year old girl whom he later (unknown how much later) has sex with. At the time, ten was still a bit too young, but it wasn't unusual for teenagers to get married -- but ten now is pedophilia land, no questions, and so how do you write a story that is compelling and has a character that you can relate to if he's picking up a ten year old girl to adopt and later sleep with?

Anyway, I digress. When my guests left, I felt very energized about my writing again; even though this class has nothing to do with romance novels, I really like the people in this group a lot, and I'm glad we're still getting together after the class is over. The key for me is to translate that energy into finishing my damn book. I wanted to write tonight, but I needed a break from the grueling day. However, I need to get up quite early tomorrow and really focus on rewriting the intro so that I can get the weekend off to the right start.

If you have any books you've been reading and loving, I'd love to hear about them - please leave a comment. Otherwise, goodnight!

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