Tuesday, February 08, 2011

i'm not drowning...there's no one here to save

I may have outdone myself today -- or, at least, I've outdone my own (admittedly high) levels of dorkiness. And frankly, I couldn't be more satisfied, even if it's yet another nail in the coffin of my eccentricity. As of today, I'm a proud holder of a Stanford library card, replete with both unlimited access to the building and the ability to check out up to twenty-five books at a time. You can tell how quickly I have fallen into complete ridiculousness, since I chose to spend my funds on a library card rather than shoes (actually, I have some shoes coming from Zappos tomorrow, but they're new running shoes, and I used some of the credit I have with them from shoes I bought/returned last summer).

Anyway, today was excellent and v. productive, even if I saw no one and didn't write a single word. I got up sometime in the midmorning, ate breakfast while catching up on zee internets, and then showered and dolled myself up in a dress and high heels -- I figure I should dress nicely once in awhile, or else I might forget how. Clearly my feet are not used to heels, since I was on the verge of forming blisters and felt sore after only a couple of hours, but it was nice to wear something other than Uggs for a little bit. I went to downtown Palo Alto to write, grabbed lunch at CPK (since I've tried to convince several people to go there recently and apparently everyone else hates it), and continued to jot down ideas at Starbucks. I eventually realized that I needed to take a time-out for research -- the book's final battle, so to speak, happens at a masquerade, but I began to suspect that the scandalous, orgy-like masquerade that I was planning (not that the hero and heroine participate, but it's an event geared for the more risque side of society, not the prim and proper debutantes) was more Georgian than Regency, and so was happening about forty years too late. I also have no idea how risque the costumes for a masquerade could be. Theoretically, I could have kept writing and done the research later -- but as 'later' is approximately two weeks from now, I might as well do it now and make sure I'm not writing something that is completely impossible.

So, I came home, spent a couple of hours searching for books on Stanford's card catalog, and checked the bibliographies of several reference books I already have to supplement the catalog search. Thus armed with a long list of possible books, and filled with the leftovers from my CPK lunch, I went to Stanford campus at seven -- and stayed there until the library closed at one a.m. I got my card with no problems, proceeded to wander around two floors of the library to pull ~15 books, and sat down to go through them. A few of them weren't relevant, but many of them were excellent. There were several that I thought I could just get through the relevant portions of at the library, so I read/skimmed six books, making notes on my laptop as I went. I learned a lot of fascinating stuff, but I shall save that for another time -- right now, I'm rather tired, and I have to be at the gym by ten a.m.

But, I shall end by saying that it felt awesome to get so sucked into the research, and Stanford gives me access to all sorts of books that are out of print/would never be findable otherwise. Being able to do research there, both for the Regency romances I'm working on and the gargoyle young adult series I'm planning (which has v. little to do with gargoyles), is going to be fantastic. And I don't care if that makes me a dork -- although I may need to try to seduce a grad student who is also nocturnal, because this might pull me even further outside of normal society.

Okay, it's bedtime -- come back for more of this drivel tomorrow!

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