and i won't be denied by you, the animal inside of you

I stayed up far later than I intended tonight, which is the inevitable consequence of taking a two-hour afternoon nap. The nap was, in turn, an inevitable consequence of getting up at 7am this morning, which is the earliest I've woken up in well over a month. While the alarm went off at seven, I didn't drag myself out of bed until 7:30, which made it a bit challenging to make it to Berkeley in time for the start of the romance meeting. As it turns out, I made it with ten minutes to spare for the 9:30am meeting start time, and was happy to find that there was still food left, but I missed out on almost the entire social hour before the meeting. C'est la vie, I suppose.

However, the meeting was good, if nothing else because one of the authors who spoke also has a frightening tendency to toss out and rewrite her entire manuscript every time. I sincerely hope that I never go through the massive amount of toss out/start over that I went through on this book, but at least it's nice to see that someone can have a reasonably successful career using that method even if it does lead to some madness along the way. I also got to catch up with some people I know, and so it was all lovely.

As soon as the meeting was over, I ditched the group and skipped the after-meeting optional lunch; I'm always so inspired to write after these things that I don't want to stick around. So, I drove back to Palo Alto and had a late breakfast/lunch at Joanie's Cafe, where I took the v. unusual step of writing an editorial letter to myself. Basically, this is a letter that lays out in some detail the key areas for improvement, and while I've flagged different things and made a variety of different lists, I thought I'd try writing a letter to myself to see if it helped to break through the block I've been experiencing. And, I must say that I was successful; between Joanie's and home, I wrote a three-page letter that helped me to refocus.

Then, I took a nap. Then, I procrastinated for an hour. Finally, around 6:15, I got myself into gear and went to Stanford, where I had coffee and then dinner at the CoHo while writing, before adjourning to the Stanford library and writing until 11:30pm. It's dead week at Stanford, so the library was hopping and open late for a Saturday, and the large tables with copious outlets (and no wireless access for non-students) were exactly what I needed to be productive.

I didn't get all the way through what I need to change, of course, but I rewrote the opening pages (the bane of my freaking existence) and made substantial progress with the rest. I came home shortly before the library closed at midnight, spent some time researching tires online since I need to replace mine, and then worked on zee novel for another hour.

And now, my clock has automatically switched from two a.m. to three a.m., and I am desperate for sleep. I need to spend tomorrow doing some less delightful tasks, particularly related to taxes, since I'm finally getting them done on Tuesday and I need to go through the giant piles of unopened mail and filter out the various year-end forms. Yay. Goodnight!