whenever, wherever

The grad students are rocking tonight - I can hear music emanating from the east side of Stanford campus, so there must be a party going on someplace. I had not intended to stay up this late, but I made the mistake of picking up a book, and you know how that story always ends. Miraculously, I didn't stay up and finish it; I managed to put it down a little over halfway in. Perhaps this isn't a real feat, since I've read the book before, but still, I am impressed with my willpower.

The rest of my day was not particularly strong from a willpower standpoint; I didn't write, although I'm still mulling over the ending, and trusting that this brief, unplanned hiatus is what my subconscious needs to enable me to get it down on paper. I did, however, wake up and v. briefly see Vidius Chandicus, who called at 9:30am to say that she was near my house and would come over for ten minutes. She was true to her word, so I very bizarrely saw her at the beginning of the day before she went on her merry way. Then, I had some breakfast, dallied around, and then went to the gym to train with Alyssa since I missed Tuesday's session.

I've decided that trying to get up early like a 'normal' person is completely overrated, and my training session with Alyssa confirmed it. When I trained at eight a.m. the past few weeks, I went into the gym feeling like death, felt nauseated during every session, and was generally miserable. Today, though, I was perfectly chipper, felt quite spry, and completed a much more intense workout than I was capable of doing at eight a.m. yesterday. So, I'm glad that Alyssa and I agreed to switch to ten a.m. sessions next week -- still early enough that I get home by noon rather than two p.m., but late enough that I have a chance to properly wake up and have breakfast beforehand without wanting to die in the attempt.

So I came home around two p.m. with the intention of writing, and yet somehow got sucked into the internet. I've been thinking about my Twitter strategy, my writing blog, my author platform, etc., and so I spent an inordinate amount of time playing with Twitter, reading other author blogs, etc. This is possibly helpful, although it would be more helpful to finish my stupid book. I took a break from my research to make supper (white chili), did a bit more online, and then threw in the towel and picked up a book.

The book is NEVERWHERE by Neil Gaiman, and I've read it before -- but when I read it before, I devoured it, I believe on a plane, and this time I'm trying to read it critically, like a writer, to understand how he crafts the story and language. It won't help my romance writing, but I have an inkling that studying it (and a bunch of other books -- I also spent some time today refreshing myself on the Harry Potter series, for what it's worth) will help me to identify my fantastic (as in fantastical, not awesome, although I hope it will be that too) voice for the young adult series I'm thinking of. Now that I'm reading this book more critically, I'm seeing that Gaiman makes some really interesting choices with sentence structure, narrative, point of view, etc. that create the fabric of the story, and that all the puns, jokes, etc. are like sequins on top of the fabric. NEVERWHERE is appealing to me anyway because its basic premise is that there is a London Below that mirrors, in v. odd ways, the London Above that we would live in (so while there's a neighborhood named Earl's Court in London, which is where I stayed when I went a couple of years ago, in London Below there is an actual earl who holds court in a subway car on the Underground). I'm an Anglophile anyway, so it's no wonder I liked this book -- but the language, if you pay attention to it, is stunning.

So, feeling quite shabby about my own language and despairing of ever creating anything quite so cool (and yet oddly, stubbornly determined to do it anyway), I'm going to go to bed. I think tomorrow requires the no-internet, no-smartphone strategy that I deployed last week, so I may spend the day at Stanford library -- nice atmosphere, although it would be nice if I could work in my house instead, where I have delicious tea and several somewhat edible (if you count brown rice cakes and organic peanut butter as edible) snacks. Goodnight!