I'm not quite sure what's wrong with me; I woke up at 6am and threw up (which made me infinitely happy that I had cleaned my bathroom yesterday), and I've felt vaguely nauseated all day. I'm not running a fever (if anything, the two times I took my temperature today, I was half a degree below normal), and while I did have a lot of fresh vegetables this week (including spinach and tomatoes) and some hard-boiled eggs, this isn't the violent illness one might expect from salmonella. So, I'm not sure what's up with that, but it made me feel rather malaise-y, and so I didn't write as much as I intended.
However, I did drag myself out of the house eventually and went to Cafe Borrone (where I only ate half my sandwich, which should be an indication that something is wrong). Then I came home, cleaned my kitchen, and tried to write some more, but eventually I gave up. So, I caught up on "Top Chef" while researching possible new names for my characters, since I'm going to change some of them -- the titles of my main male characters are too similar (Rothwell and Rossendale), and I also need to name a couple of new characters and rename a couple of other minor ones. Rothwell is Ferguson's technical title (he's William Ferguson Avenel, duke of Rothwell). This means that, the day he inherits, everyone in the world starts calling him Rothwell. And that fact means that Madeleine (the heroine) would know him as Rothwell before being introduced to him, and it would be rather improper of her to call him by his childhood nickname. So, I have a major decision to make: I like having him refer to himself as Ferguson (and get Madeleine to call him that) because he still hasn't come to terms with inheriting his father's title, but I'm worried that readers will be confused when he's sometimes called Ferguson and sometimes called Rothwell. Also, as much as I love Ferguson, Rothwell just has more of the classic bad boy ring to it. So, I am v. conflicted -- if any readers of this blog have an opinion, please do share it.
After catching up on "Top Chef," I spent way too much time in the bowels of Wikipedia, reading up on all sorts of useless but fascinating historical material; did you know that Charlemagne didn't let his daughters marry because he didn't want to create any more legitimate branches of his family line to compete w/the lines of his sons? But, he let them become mistresses and welcomed their illegitimate children with open arms. His son didn't seem to see things the same way, however, and banished his sisters to convents after he inherited. That's your fun fact of the day -- you can thank me for it later.
Finally, I remembered that I needed to judge some entries for a writing contest sponsored by the San Francisco romance chapter, and so I read all six of them (15 pages each) tonight. I need to score them tomorrow, but I'm glad that I read them and gave them a chance to sit in my mind; there were a couple that were great, a couple that had intriguing ideas but flawed style/grammar (which I need to be careful about grading, since I apparently care more about that than some people -- but seriously, if you're going to be a novelist, you should know the difference between "it's" and "its"), and a couple that were somewhat blah. It was another reminder of how hard it is to write a good opening scene that pulls in the reader, and I know I'm going to struggle with that on every book I write.
And now, I'm going to go to bed and hope the nausea resolves itself. Just in case it doesn't, I canceled my massage/facial in SF tomorrow (since getting a massage while trying not to throw up sounds distinctly unappealing) -- so I'm going to spend the day forcing myself to write whether my damned elusive muse decides to show up or not. I'm starting to fall behind on my October 1 goal, so I need to get cracking. Goodnight!
Daily word count: 375 (18.75% of goal - also did some editing and brainstorming of next scenes)
Productive time: 4.75hrs (includes reading entries to judge)
RescueTime productivity rating: 0.62 (global average: 0.19)
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