dirty bit

I had an utterly fun, utterly exhausting day, and I need to go to bed immediately so that I can make it up to Berkeley tomorrow morning for the monthly meeting of my romance writers' chapter. I was awake by 7:30ish this morning, and the first thing I saw was an email from my agent -- she read the whole first half of my book (the same thing that I sent to some beta readers in November and entered in that contest in early December), and she said that she really loves it. All her feedback was either a) positive or b) useful/doable, with the only substantive changes related to considering increasing the steaminess (since romance is trending 'hotter', and Madeleine and Ferguson do not have sex until halfway into the book, which is practically an eternity in today's publishing climate). We're going to set up a call for sometime in the next week or two to discuss the end and any initial plans for which editors to submit to. But, it was definitely a huge relief that she liked it, and I'm excited to finish it. She also said that if we try to resell the first book I wrote, I'm going to have to substantially rewrite it to match the great leap forward (in a non-communist sense) that I've taken with my writing -- which I agree with, since compared to this book, my first book is unreadable swill (as much as I loved it at the time).

So, that automatically started me off in the right mood. I messed around the house and straightened things up and unpacked for a couple of hours, and then met up with Tammy (in town from Boston) at Cafe Borrone. We proceeded to hit a trifecta of all my favorite places -- Borrone in Menlo Park, followed by Samovar *and* the Noe Valley Philz Coffee in San Francisco. All in all, we spent about seven hours together, which was totally lovely; she's crazy and ridiculous, and I adore her for it.

Driving her back to the city and hanging out there made perfect sense because I had dinner plans up there -- as soon as I abandoned her, I met up with Pete, Heather and Durand at Mission Beach Cafe. Detail-oriented readers will remember that I had a delicious rabbit pot pie there with Adit, Priyanka, etc. (although they didn't eat any of it, since they are godforsaken vegetarians) back when I still lived in the evil city, and Adit, Vidya and I had an epic mimosa-fueled brunch there (paid for by my former employer) shortly before Adit abandoned the city for the beast coast. Anyway, we had a fantastic time; I reprised my rabbit pot pie, we had a couple of bottles of fantastic wine, and generally spent 2.5 hours gossiping and catching up. Heather boyfriend met us just as we were leaving, and we walked down the street to Elixer to hang out for another hour before parting ways. It was awesome to see them; Pete, Heather and I used to do 'margaritas and pie' every month when we all worked together, but we're no longer on the same team (and I'm no longer employed there anyway), so the tradition fell apart a year ago. Pete's moving to SoCal, though, so getting together was imperative -- and for the first time ever, we actually had a piece of pie at margaritas and pie (although we didn't have margaritas -- you can't win 'em all).

But now that I'm home safe and sound, and curled up under my down comforter, I'm going to go to sleep and dream of what awaits Madeleine and Ferguson at the end of this book. Goodnight!