Tuesday, November 23, 2010

sweet perfume never tortured me more than this

So I realized tonight that the theme song for the hero of my next book (Nicholas Claiborne, marquess of Folkestone and Ellie's once and future lover) is some bizarre combination of Sting's "Desert Rose" and Alice Cooper's "Poison". So far, none of my characters have had theme songs performed by Nickelback, which relieves me since I get enough ridicule for the Nickelback on my iPod as it is, but my writing career will be a long one and I don't expect to avoid that particular embarrassment forever.

Anyway, I was more slothful than I intended today, since I was taking care of stuff before driving down to LA tomorrow. I made it to my training session with Alyssa today (who said that my squats are looking much better -- if I were in training for a cross-India train journey, then I would apparently be doing the right exercises to avoid urinating on my own feet in the train bathroom), and I'm going to try to go into the gym tomorrow before taking off (if my virtuous desires for once outweigh my lazy tendencies). Then, I came home, packed up my laptop, went to Cafe Borrone, and enjoyed a bowl of soup and some toast while writing for an hour or so. After Borrone, I came home, did laundry, packed, did dishes, answered emails, took a nap, procrastinated a bit, etc., and then ate a quick dinner before going out to run a couple of last-minute errands, get cash, get gas, and generally finish preparing for my trip. I also wrote a bit tonight, although not as much as I should have.

I'm starting to think that perhaps, given my acknowledged all-or-nothing work style, that in the future I should ignore all the advice to write every day and instead write every other day -- days on would be a hard and brutal slog, and days off would involve trying to use the computer as little as possible and read, watch movies, go to the beach, people watch, think about future books, etc. The problem right now is that a lot of my procrastination happens on the computer, and that's where my writing happens too -- so even though I spent nine hours on the computer today, I certainly didn't get nine hours of writing out of it, but I did get a massive eyestrain headache because I don't even have meetings with other people to break up my computer usage. This is all going to have to change -- which I will work on in a couple of weeks, once I'm done with my Golden Heart entry.

Finally, for those of you following my heating saga: I did email my landlord today, and he's going to send someone to fix it when I'm in my house next week. However, I also let the heater run well past the point where it should have shut off just to see if it will ever shut off on its own -- and discovered that it generally does shut off about five degrees above the expected mark, and turn on 5-10 degrees below it. It's a crapshoot, really, and I'm hopeful that the heater expert can either fix the thermostat or install a new one, since the thermostat still suffers from the issue of the needle sticking; but, after discovering this, my house was certainly warmer today than it was yesterday.

Okay, I must go to bed; I'm trying to go to the gym and still get out of Palo Alto by 11am tomorrow, so sleep is imperative. Goodnight!

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