you've got to be stronger than the story

I failed to be stronger than the story today. I tried to rewrite the first chapter of my book tonight...and tried...and tried. I tried at Cafe Borrone over my favorite sandwich; then I came home and tried over a big mug of my favorite chai. I eventually abandoned the laptop and tried pen and paper...and I wrote four pages, all of which I'm going to cut. It wasn't four pages in a row; it was four pages full of 2-3 paragraph attempts at an opening. Ugh. I finally gave it up for the night as a lost cause and spent the past two and a half hours doing work for the day job while watching 'Covert Affairs' and last night's episode of Craig. I had an all-day training today that kept me from getting anything done at work, so the work that I did tonight was v. necessary, but I would have felt better about it had I finished a draft of the new opening for my book.

Then again, I'm totally wide awake, so maybe I'll think about it some more tonight even though it's 12:30am. I like to think that caffeine has absolutely no effect on me, but it probably wasn't smart to make myself sixteen ounces of chai at 8pm. I'm going to try to go to bed anyway; I have to go to a meeting at 8am before starting another all-day training at 9am, so I should really get some sleep.

I shall leave you with a picture of the dress that I bought for the awards ceremony at the romance conference; I haven't picked the dress up yet, but I found this picture on the Nordstrom website for your viewing pleasure:

I guess it's more grey than brown in this picture; I'm going to be curious to see it when I get it out of the unnatural light of the dressing room. As you can see, it comes down quite low in the front, and so I had to buy one of those glue-on backless strapless numbers. [spoiler alert: the squeamish amongst you should stop reading now and pretend that I said goodnight here] I tried the bra on tonight to make sure it was going to work and that I wouldn't have any bad reaction to the adhesive. The verdict: the glue worked and the bra stayed in place. However, it's two individual silicone cups that adhere to your breasts and then connect with a clasp in between to pull the breasts together -- and I have to say that molding a silicone cup to my skin looked and felt like I was gluing a piece of chicken to my breast. But hey, if the chicken-y bra keeps everything in place and doesn't fall out of my dress while I'm presenting the award, I'll be a happy camper.


And now, after far too much discussion of my unmentionables (which I seem to have a fascination with mentioning), it's time for bed!