Friday, April 15, 2011

i was waiting on a different story

It's only 11:25, but I think I shall actually go to bed -- crazy, I know. I had a long, productive day, culminating in a lovely dinner with friends, and I would rather sleep it all off and get up early to do some work tomorrow. I can hear all of you snorting at that, since you know me too well to believe that I'll actually get out of bed a moment earlier than usual, but I'm going to try my damnedest.

As for today, it all started off with a training session with Alyssa. She made me do one of my least favorite exercises -- she calls it wall-ball, which involves squatting, and then as you're standing up, throwing a heavy ball (more like a large, dense bean bag) as high as you can against a fifteen-foot-tall wall. This isn't the hardest exercise by any means, but given my lack of coordination and my small, raccoon-like hands, I have a tendency to miss the ball on the way down and let it hit me in the face. And for some reason, that just spurred a bizarre memory from what seems like a lifetime ago, when John and I were sitting in his room and he was throwing a basketball at the wall over my head in what was essentially a trust game, and then Zach (I think it was Zach, although perhaps I should give the credit to Adit as usual) came in, took the basketball from John, but thought we were playing catch -- and so I took the basketball in the face. Ah, memories.

Anyway, other than wall-ball, everything else was good, and I did some stairmaster afterwards like a good gym drone. I came home for a bit and caught up on the internet world while eating lunch, and then I went to downtown Mountain View to have a latte at Red Rock Cafe and start proofreading a book for someone. This is part of my investigation into whether freelance editing for fun and profit is something that I want to take on -- based on the work I did this afternoon, the jury is out on whether I can charge enough to make it worth my while, but it's something I could enjoy if I could make enough money on it. I need to finish the project tomorrow, though, which is why I should get up early to work on it.

I came home at some point, worked some more, and finally threw in the towel to meet up with Jenni and James for pizza in downtown Palo Alto. It was wonderful to see them; I realized we hadn't gotten together since Christmas, which is rather unfortunate. We ended up sitting at Patxi's for three hours, then grabbing gelato just before the gelato place closed, so I didn't get home until almost 10:30. They seemed to be in good form, and they caught me up on all the gossip at work -- it really would be easy to walk into the office tomorrow and pretend like I never left.

But enough blogging; I should really sleep. My agent told me today that she's pitched the book to all but a couple of people, and so the waiting game begins. Sleep now holds the additional benefit of being the eight or nine hours a day when I am not checking my email and daydreaming/agonizing about my publication chances. I'm going to try to keep myself from going crazy while I wait, which would be an additional benefit of doing some editing on top of writing Ellie's book. But I'm getting ahead of myself -- sleep comes first, and business plans can come later. Goodnight!

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