and i wonder if i ever cross your mind...for me it happens all the time

So I'm embarrassed to say that I spent some time tonight making a playlist for the next book I'm going to write (Ferguson's sister Ellie and her long-lost lover-turned-enemy Nick, who is now the marquess of Folkestone) and it made me cry. I'm not a particularly good crier, but this playlist will do it -- and I even downloaded a Lady Antebellum song for it, which I hope to God is not the beginning of a slow slide into liking country music. While I haven't started outlining the book yet, since I'm still in the throes of this one, I've set my mind to work thinking about them. My agent wants an outline of their story before we start shopping the book I'm working on so that we can try to sell them together, which means I have to actually plot it out in advance much better than the disaster that was my attempts to plot Madeleine and Ferguson's book (remember how Ferguson used to have a father? and Madeleine used to have a fake French brother show up, only to be surprised when her real long-lost French brother, who was a kingpin in the Parisian underworld and too embarrassed by what he had done to survive the French revolution to ever come to England, showed up to rescue her? and Ferguson's cousin used to be trying to kill him? and the twins didn't exist?).

But even though I'm thinking about Ellie and Nick, and getting goosebumps about how good their story might be if I can figure it out and add some plot beyond recycling Lady Antebellum lyrics, I need to stay focused and finish this book. I only wrote three pages today -- not great, but at least it was something, and I think the masquerade is going to rock. I got up around ten today, ate some cheerios, checked out all my usual websites, and eventually went to the gym, where I spent forty minutes on the treadmill (while reading a romance writer magazine) and twenty minutes foam rolling (basically, massaging myself by rolling over a big tube of hardpacked foam, which feels totally awkward, painful, and wonderful). I grabbed a salad there, came home, ate said salad, and then talked to my parents for over an hour. Then, even though I don't particularly care about football and wouldn't have even known who was playing without the stuff I've seen on Twitter this week, I watched the Super Bowl -- and *adored* the Chrysler/Detroit commercial with Eminem, among others. I also got sucked in to watching the episode of "Glee" that came after the Super Bowl, and so perhaps it's not surprising that I only wrote three pages, since I started writing after ten p.m.

So while I like the scene I'm working on, I think I'll go to bed -- I'd rather wake up in the middle of the scene and eager to get back to it than stewing over how to start the next one. And perhaps tomorrow I'll listen to more cheerful music, as is befitting of the ridiculous time that Madeleine and Ferguson are about to have (rather than the tense/depressing backstory of Ellie and Nick's tragic relationship). Goodnight!