Monday, August 23, 2010

the second hand unwinds

It's too bad I didn't start being productive about three hours earlier in the day so that I could have gone to bed before one a.m. -- particularly since I have to make it to the office in time for an eight a.m. meeting tomorrow. I set my alarm for 8:30am and everything, but I was having strange dreams (that I now only vaguely remember as pertaining to my wedding, but it was sort of a horror/freakshow wedding at the same time, and I vividly remember trying to line my lips as though they were my eyelids, which was a bit scary) and ended up hitting snooze until almost ten a.m. I ate some Frosted Flakes (breakfast of champions), took a shower, reread a bit of CATCHING FIRE (which I am utterly besotted with -- I can't put into words how in despair I am about the fact that I will never write like this woman, since I'm much too wordy to get so much action into so few words like she does), and then decided to get out of the house to write. I had my bag packed and on my shoulder, and was reaching for my keys...

...when I was distracted by the books above my keys, and picked one up, and ended up reading for a couple of hours. For the first fifteen minutes or so I read with my bag still on my shoulder, but I eventually gave up on that, and kept reading despite myself. The book was THE CONQUEROR by Georgette Heyer; it's one of her handful of historical novels dealing with real people, in this case William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, King of England, etc., etc. I didn't read all of it, and have still never read it all the way through -- unlike her romances, it's kind of hard to get into because she stays relatively true to the history and some of it gets a bit dry (she's so good at history and recreating battle scenes that her depiction of Waterloo from AN INFAMOUS ARMY has been used by the UK's officer training program at Sandhurst), but William the Conqueror is a v. interesting dude (I'm sure he'd appreciate that description), and his accomplishments are legendary.

After that, I was feeling distinctly unlegendary, particularly since I had lazed the day away. So, I called my parents for our ritual Sunday call, and still managed to talk to them for 90 minutes despite talking to them twice this week already (shocker). Then, I finally (!) got out of the house around seven, grabbed a burrito (mistake - my stomach has hurt for the past five hours), and then went to Starbucks to write. I succeeded in writing a little over 1000 words -- not the most ever, but certainly a respectable endeavor. Then, I came home and spent three hours judging the romance contest that I needed to judge, and I just wrapped that up a few minutes ago.

So now, I'm off to bed, and I'm hoping that I can get myself back into the swing of things with my writing this week -- although with a lot of stuff going on at the day job, and the release of multiple books that I've been waiting for for weeks/months is just going to make things worse. MOCKINGJAY, the sequel to those books I read over the last two weeks, comes out on Tuesday, and I'm going to want to read it before I hit the inevitable spoilers on Twitter, since the real world has likely never heard of it, but the romance world is foaming at the mouth waiting for the trilogy to end. Kresley Cole's DEMON FROM THE DARK comes out tomorrow or Tuesday -- and yes, you can mock me for loving a serious of books with titles like that. Finally, Gail Carriger's BLAMELESS comes out on the 26th; it's Victorian 'steampunk' (which I won't even get into explaining right now, since I'm too tired and you don't care) with vampires and werewolves, and when I read the last book in the series while coughing up my lungs in London a few months ago, I was devastated when it ended on the worst cliffhanger ever. So, I'll try to keep myself honest and write every day -- but I am admitting in advance that I may have a relapse. Goodnight!

Daily word count: 1096 (54.8% of goal)
Productive time: 4hrs (includes reading entries to judge)
RescueTime productivity rating: 1.11 (global average: 0.18)

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