Sunday, May 22, 2011

what am i gonna do when the best part of me was always you

I've only been out of bed for twelve hours, but it's rapidly nearing the time when I should crawl back into it. I woke up sometime after ten a.m., but spent the next hour and a half lying in bed with my laptop, catching up on the online world. Finally, I decided I should do something a bit more productive, and so I showered, put in a minimal amount of attention to my appearance, and drove to Palo Alto for a late lunch at Sprout. I enjoyed my salad at a slow pace while writing some ideas in my brainstorming journal -- and then was v. pleasantly interrupted by Sophie and Joanna, two girls from my former place of employment, who happened to stroll in for lunch. I ended up joining them at a bigger table and spent a delightful forty-five minutes or so catching up on work and life, which was a nice interlude in my regularly-scheduled hermitville.

After parting ways with them, I grabbed some tea at Starbucks, then snuck it into the Stanford library, where I spent several hours working on zee romance novel. Actually, I alternated between working and checking twitter, with a break to get a latte from the Coupa Cafe kiosk outside the library, but I still managed to be productive -- I wrote exactly 2000 words, which was my goal, and equates to about nine pages. The scene I was initially working on totally sucked and made me despair of ever being a real novelist, but when I wrote some vague handwavy 'finish this scene later' lines and moved on to the next one, I got excited again. I'll just have to ignore the first two chapters and move forward, or else I'll get trapped in an endless rewrite loop, which won't do me any good. I actually had a brief conversation on twitter with several other writers, in which we discovered that we are all Virgos and that we all have extremely tragic relationships with the beginnings of our novels -- one of them also scrapped the first half of her last manuscript like I did (although I have the dubious distinction of scrapping it twice). So at least I'm not alone, even though I hope I never do that again.

Finally, I left the library around 7:30, picked up some food at Chipotle (I need to go grocery shopping), came home, ate, and proceeded to do some housecleaning. I cleaned the kitchen, cleaned the bathroom, unpacked from my trip, and opened my lingering mail; all that's left on the must-do list is laundry, swiffering, and dusting (particularly of my desk, so that I can work at it comfortably; the dust can continue to accumulate elsewhere). And now, feeling quite smug with all my accomplishments, I think I'll go to bed (and perhaps take a book with me); I need to get up slightly earlier tomorrow if I have any hope of making it to the gym before getting on with my day. Goodnight!

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