i can feel your heart beat through my shirt

I'm tired and about to go to bed - but since I expect that I will quickly shift to a 1am-9am sleep schedule since I no longer have to drag myself to the office at a respectable hour, I'm not really forcing myself to sleep. Perhaps I should try to stay on an office schedule, but I just don't think I have it in me to become a morning person regardless of how many people seem to love sunrises and getting their best work done while all the rest of the world is asleep.

I stuck with my hiatus from writing for the weekend; there were a couple of times when I thought I should sit down and write, but I held myself back. I think a weekend of manual labor and reading is exactly what I need to clear my head of the remnants of the day job before I jump into writing in earnest next week. As a result, my labors around the house were pretty successful today. I shifted summer and winter clothes between my bedroom closet and the hallway closet, putting most of my work clothes in the hallway and moving my comfiest, oldest sweatshirts and sweaters into my main closet. While I've become addicted to fashion, I still like to be comfortable, and I have a feeling that comfort is going to trump fashion in my writing career, at least around the house. Then, I unpacked and organized all the piles of stuff strewn around the floor of the bedroom, so it's now truly livable for the first time since moving in. I still need to put together the bedframe that I ordered, but I put that off until tomorrow because when I finally had the space necessary to tackle it, it was four p.m. and the light on that side of the house had vanished for the day.

After leaving the bedroom to encroaching darkness, I did a couple of hours' worth of email for my real life and my alter ego. I finally set up Gmail's Priority Inbox for both accounts; I used it at work and loved it, but had never bothered to set it up for the rest of my life. Now, both accounts have important messages automatically moved to the top, and I set up an 'action' label that I can give to emails that require me to do something so that they're all grouped in their own little part of my inbox. Brilliant! I'm trying to get off on the right foot when it comes to communications, since I've neglected my personal email for years and need to get better at it if I'm going to ever talk to enough people to keep me sane while I'm staying home all day.

Ultimately, I took a shower, ordered some Thai food (from a place on California Ave - not the best I've ever had by a long shot, but since it's only five minutes away, it was a win), and watched last week's "Project Runway". Then, I picked up a book -- WICKED LOVELY, which beat out the other options because it was shorter. The basic premise is that some seventeen year old is chosen by the faeries' Summer King to be his queen and end his mother (the Winter Queen)'s reign, but the girl doesn't want to do it. I had high hopes because it was recommended by a couple of authors I love, but while I was really intrigued by the mythology behind the story, it was just a little bit flat. Too bad -- I might read the next ones in the series anyway, because I'm a completist, but it was nowhere near some of the other stuff I've liked recently.

You'll note that I'm reading a lot of either fantasy or young adult these days (which probably explains why Katie no longer calls me, since her abhorrence of fantasy is legendary). Part of it is because I have trouble reading other historical romances while I'm writing them. A bigger part is that I really want to write a young adult fantasy/end of the world story, and so this is all research in addition to pleasure. When I started writing romance, I'd already read hundreds of them, so I didn't need to do a deep exploration of storylines, expected plot points, voice, etc. But with young adult, I have to do the research -- when I qualified as a young adult, this type of book wasn't quite as prevalent, and if it was, I was too busy plowing through the romance/mystery/literature/history sections to check out young adult anyway. But I'm starting to get a feel for the emotional arcs, standard characters, rhythm/pacing/voice, etc., which is a good step.

So now, I'm off to bed. Tomorrow brings more cleaning (if my foot holds up - I strained the left one badly while wearing flip flops in Tokyo, and since I made the mistake of wearing flip flops on Thursday while carrying many boxes of stuff down to my car at work, the pain has flared up again), laundry, and drafting a blog post for the romance website I sometimes blog for. Yay - goodnight!