i want to take shelter from the poison rain

Today was just the right amount of busy after yesterday's mad rush to get my contest entry out the door; luckily, the rush was successful, since both FedEx and the contest administrators confirmed that it was delivered today (a whole day early, because I am turning over a new leaf). I didn't get up until ten, and then I putzed around the house until it was time to meet Alyssa for a training session. It's kind of cool that I can feel myself getting looser/more aligned in only a few weeks, even if the results aren't really obvious yet (mostly due to a combination of Thanksgiving and some mild-to-moderate stress snacking while writing). We're going to train five or six more times before I go home for the holidays, where I will promptly forget all about newfangled things like gyms and all-natural organic unprocessed foods and nut butters (which is a name for the various organic butters made out of peanuts, almonds, etc. that makes the eight year old inside me giggle).

After training, showering, eating a huge salad, and bundling up against the frigid Palo Alto weather (it continues to be cold -- I could actually see my breath last night and tonight, which is v. unusual), I trundled off to Cafe Borrone, where I spent the afternoon writing. I thought I would want a break after the Golden Heart slog, but luckily this was not the case, so I banged out my requisite 2000 words (ending just before another hot scene between Madeleine and Ferguson, which I chose to postpone so that I wouldn't be blushing in the corner of my favorite cafe). Then, I went to my last magazine class, where we talked v. briefly about class-related topics and spent the rest of the evening enjoying a variety of treats and beverages that the class brought in. I had a good conversation with several women who are trying to pursue writing more seriously and are considering/are applying to MFA programs, and once again was nearly seduced by the idea of writing a book about the romance community (which could be a hilarious way to destroy my romance career).

So even though I didn't think that I was going to take a class next quarter, I ended up coming home and signing up for a fiction class on point of view. These classes are fun, and while taking two in a quarter proved to be too much, they've both been useful for thinking about writing in different ways. The point of view class will get me back into fiction (and hopefully writing stuff that I could use for a portfolio if I decide to apply for an MFA myself in order to string out the number of years I can go without being gainfully employed, and then get some sort of academic job instead of crawling back to the corporate world) -- and I think it will be quite useful as I start to think about my gargoyle series.

I've been assuming that I would write the gargoyle books in first person, and I sort of have the heroine's voice in my head already (hint: longterm readers of this blog may find the voice strangely familiar), but I really haven't bothered to study POV because the POV choices in romance are very clear. The trend now is to do close-third-person, mostly in the heroine's head with some scenes in the hero's head. What this means is that in each scene, you only see/know what the heroine (or hero, if it's a hero-POV scene) sees/knows -- and it's close enough that you're in her head and essentially overhearing how she thinks/processes, rather than just observing the outside world. Since that's the only viable option for historical romance, I haven't paid attention to the other forms (limited third, omniscient third, first, second -- which is very rare, although AND THEN WE CAME TO THE END is written in second-person plural and is quite good). The syllabus seems a bit intense and I think I'm going to have to put a lot more work into it if I want to get anything out of it -- but as I will hopefully be wrapping up edits on Madeleine/Ferguson's story and starting to research both Ellie/Nick and the gargoyle books, I should have time. And this gives me free access to Stanford's libraries for the quarter, so the research can progress in earnest.

But now, after once again staying up later than intended, I should go to sleep. Duke is coming tomorrow to check out my thermostat situation -- and his name really does seem to be Duke, which fascinates me. I have a feeling he is not the duke that I have been dreaming about, but if he does sweep me off my feet, you will be the first to know. So, I need to get to sleep so that I can get up early enough to tidy up and move the TWILIGHT books that are prominently shelved directly below the thermostat, since I don't want to live up to any stereotypes about single women living alone. Goodnight!