there's a countdown waiting for me to erupt

Even though I was loath to get out of bed this morning, I made it down to the glorious south bay in time to train with Alyssa. We didn't get much training done; today was one of our periodic reassessment days in which we measure everything, set goals, etc. Since I haven't been in town much for the past few months, the main goal was just to maintain everything, but now that I'm looking at some extended time in California (with the exception of the twelve days I'm spending in Iowa at the end of the month), we've set some aggressive goals. Of course, all the stuff we discussed related to diet is directly dependent on whether I'm allowed to eat anything after I meet with my doctor on Tuesday -- I'm really hoping that it's an easily treatable ulcer that doesn't require long-term changes to what I eat, but we shall see.

The ulcer friend was pretty quiet today, but I barely fed it, so that seemed to starve it into submission. I'm basically living off of bread until I go to the doctor, which seems to be working. So I wrapped up at the gym, ran an errand to Target, grabbed a bread product at Starbucks for lunch, came back to the city of sin, and attempted to write this afternoon. I only got in four pages, which wasn't as much as I intended, but I'm kind of stuck because I've hit a wall (literally; the heroine's back is against a wall in a dead-end alley) and need to figure out where the next few chapters are going. I even took a break to clean my bathroom in hopes that that would inspire me (since it would be great to stop cleaning the bathroom because I needed to write -- it's a great excuse), but no dice. Eventually, I took a longer break and watched last night's episode of "Project Runway". And, Terry came home and we watched an episode of Craig, so it was all good. And then I came upstairs and wrote two pages of notes on where the story is going, so hopefully I can start writing again tomorrow.

But now I need to sleep; I'm increasing my wordcount goals aggressively for next week, and I need to start immediately. Maybe it's crazy, but I want to see if I could write this book in a couple of months if I really set my mind to it, and the only way to do that is to double my current daily wordcount averages. Doable, yes; likely, not so much. We shall see, though -- goodnight!