leave tonight or live and die this way

I've realized and am slowly coming to accept that I'm not really a 'balance' kind of person. All the advice out there is that you should strive for balance, maintaining a good relationship between work and personal life, making sure you have enough time to relax so that you can focus when you're working, etc.

But, I don't know if that's actually true for me. Looking back over the past few years, I was probably most miserable when I wasn't pushing hard enough in a direction that I wanted to go. It's probably not healthy, and it's probably not good for my relationships, but I'm just kind of an all-or-nothing kind of person. So it's little wonder that I've been having trouble 'balancing' my day job and my writing, since I feel like I should be throwing everything into either one or the other.

This week it's all writing all the time, which is going surprisingly well, even if I am getting nine hours of sleep a night. Today, I rolled out the door by eleven and went to Green Library, where I spent the afternoon alternating between the Bender Room (one of my favorite rooms in the world -- it's perfect even when there's someone snoring on one of the couches) and the Lane Reading Room. I took a break to have a sandwich at the new Coupa Cafe outside the library, and when I finally wrapped up for the day, I grabbed one of their tiger spice chais to nurse on the way home.

I took a bit of a break when I got home, interrupted by someone knocking on my door. It turned out to be a somewhat sketchy looking dude carrying two coolers and looking for my neighbor (since the division between our properties is quite confusing) -- and it says a lot that I was more nervous about someone seeing the messy state of my house than I was about possibly ending up as a cautionary tale. Then, I snuck into my office after hours to drop off my drycleaning and pick up a couple of packages, and adjourned to Starbucks to write for another hour or two. They've remodeled the Starbucks at the corner of Stanford Ave., for the first time in the ten years that I've been going there, and it looks fabulous -- and it was hopping at nine p.m. even though school isn't really in session right now. I finally stopped at a point where I was still excited so that it will be easy to jump in tomorrow, and came home to watch last night's episode of "Top Chef".

So the verdict on my writing today: Scrivener says I wrote 4799 words, which is utterly awesome (close to 20 pages). Unfortunately, I also cut a whole bunch of scenes that no longer work because the duke is dead (long live the duke) -- and so while I wrote 4799 words, I also lost almost 20,000. Damn. But, I feel like I have a decent plan of scenes to add/change/remove/rethink to make these changes work, and I'm excited to execute them. So, I need to keep cracking and see how much I can get done in the next three days before I have to go back to the day job. Sigh.

Okay, it's time for bed -- Madeleine and Ferguson await!

Daily word count: 4799 (239.95% of goal)
Productive time: 4.5hrs
RescueTime productivity rating: 1.18 (global average: 0.34)