lie down in darkness

This is the latest I've stayed up (and, consequently, the latest I've blogged) in an age -- and I'm not even drunk, so good for me. I had a mostly lovely day; the middle portion of it was dominated by meeting up with Nathan at his newest startup and participating in a user behavior interview, which basically meant that I got to talk about myself for two hours (my favorite subject!) and I got a whole sandwich as compensation. Yay. It was actually fun, even if my description sounded sarcastic. While I love writing (some days) and publishing (...even fewer days), there is a part of me that misses the speed and excitement (and compensation) of the tech world, so it was fun to see an early startup in action.

After my interview ended, I came home, spent some quality time eating the second half of my sandwich and staring off into space, and then forced myself to work on zee gargoyle book. It was slow going trying to fight my way back into it, since it's been several days since I've written anything. I finally took the unusual approach of lying on my bed, on my stomach, with my head buried in a pillow and my arms stretched in front of me, typing blind. That prevents my internal editor from going crazy with the criticism and self-loathing ("you used that tired, cliched metaphor to describe her? ugh! you are such a poser, etc., etc."). I managed to get almost four pages out that way before the air was getting too stale in my pillow prison; when I came up for air, I started fixing typos, then I started despairing, and then Terry came home and rescued me from my despair. But upon rereading some of it later, it's actually not that bad, and at least I'm four pages further along than I was -- so yay for beating my internal editor into submission, if only for a couple of hours.

Once Terry got home, we decided to order dinner, so we picked it up from Blue Barn (a salad and sandwich place that is oh-so-very Marina), brought it back, and watched last night's "Project Runway" (verdict: Oliver is pretty much the worst, since he bitched about having to dress a real woman who has breasts, particularly because she actually tried to give input on the dress he was designing for her and he didn't want her to talk). The whole episode was pretty entertaining, though, even if I feel pretty lukewarm about the designs by most of the contestants and don't think the style level matches some of the previous seasons. After watching "Project Runway", we watched an episode of "Bones", since Terry still wants me to get caught up before the new season starts (probably a losing proposition, since I'm just now at the end of season two and we have four or five more to go before November -- and I'm not really a tv person). After that, it was ten p.m. and I intended to check my email, reread my gargoyle stuff a bit, and go to bed.

But I wasn't quite tired yet, and I needed to read THE HELP before Sunday morning -- we're having book club, and Terry picked that as this session's book because she'd accidentally bought it on her Kindle. So I downloaded the book and thought I'd read a couple of chapters before going to bed. And of course, as always happens with me, I read the whole damn thing. I was surprised at how much I liked it, although now I wonder how they made it into a movie since it's not the loudest story out there. It was certainly v. interesting to me from a storytelling/craft standpoint too, although those aren't topics that I usually discuss at bookclub. And it made me wonder, just a little, if I should be writing the book of my heart about southern Iowa, although I'm not sure about the angle that I would take into that story or whether I could go home after I told it. But maybe that's me not being brave enough...or recognizing that I don't have the talent for it...or just acknowledging that it's more fun to write romance and YA and leaving it at that.

sssanyway, enough brooding over my future writing career for tonight (or rather, this morning)...and enough parentheses, too. Goodnight!