you don't own me

Staying up until four a.m. writing was great for knocking a major goal off my list and getting the first half of my book out to my beta readers. It was absolutely terrible for making anything substantial out of today. Luckily, I was able to cross of my "write at least three hours" goal today even though those three hours happened between midnight and three a.m., so I wasn't too ashamed of not writing today.

I didn't sleep particularly well last night, likely because I was so breathtakingly caffeinated to help me push through that final stretch, so when I crawled out of bed at noon, I wasn't feeling particularly chipper. I made a big vat (well, more like a small vat, but it's big for only one person) of chili, but it's a good thing that I had a granola bar at 1am and another one when I woke up briefly at nine feeling like my stomach was trying to claw its way out of my abdomen -- maybe I like to read paranormals because I will someday give birth to a demon in one of those hideously gory scenes from those horror movies I never watch? Anyway, as I was saying, it was good that I had other things to sustain me, since I ended up not eating lunch until two, and then having a snack at five and another bowl of soup at eight. And, I had to take a nap at 4:30 so that I could muster the energy to drag myself to the gym, where I stretched an excessive amount, spent more time than I would have liked (but that's not saying much, since the amount of time I would have liked was <5mins, and I did more like 25min) on the elliptical, and caught the last quarter and a half of both the Stanford/Arizona State and the Oregon/Cal games. Both games were looking dicey, and for awhile I worried that Cal was going to both prevail over Oregon and see us get knocked out by ASU, but my fears proved unfounded.

I did some freelance stuff this afternoon (another reason why I didn't write; I need to finish this project), but I decided to take a break from all work tonight and read an advance reader copy of FIRST GRAVE ON THE RIGHT by my friend Darynda Jones. The bizarre thing about this is a) even when I'm taking "time off", reading romance is kind of work, and b) becoming a writer means that I'm making friends with people who are starting to get published. Darynda was one of the fellow finalists in that award I won last year, and she won her category as well -- and has gone on to make some stupendously amazing sales, including TV rights for a young adult series that she's working on. Anyway, her book isn't out until February, but I happened to win an advanced copy so that I could review it (which I will do on zee romance blog when her pub date gets closer -- and on Goodreads and Amazon, which get more traffic than zee poor romance blog, although I'm taking that class at Stanford this quarter so that I can turn my romance blog around). And I can see why she sold this book and is getting a major marketing push (and a debut in *hardcover*, which rarely happens in romance) -- the book was fun and insanely good.

But now, even though I'm not really tired, I'm going to force myself to go to bed. Hopefully the fact that I only had one caffeinated beverage today (the horror) will help, although my lack-of-caffeine headache may not be a good thing. I have to get back onto some semblance of normal people time, though, if only so that I can eat meals when my body is expecting them and not have to oddly time then around my weird sleep schedule. Goodnight!