good girls don't but i do

It's either write some more or go to bed, so I'm choosing bed -- while I've written diligently tonight, it wasn't coming easily or quickly, and I'm too tired to gird my loins for a continued slog through the blown-out detritus of Malcolm and Amelia's story in my ongoing effort to superglue it all back together. However, today was generally good. I woke up at 8:15am (shocking, I know) and went to Berkeley for my romance writing chapter's Christmas party. It was really just our usual meeting, although it included lunch and involved a few inspirational speeches from within the chapter rather than a guest speaker. They had asked me to be one of the four speakers, and I must say that it went really well -- I got several nice comments afterwards, and I think that I struck a chord with some people, which is always nice. I'd like to do more speaking in the future at romance/publishing events, so this was a good baby step in terms of practice, and it was also fun since I really do enjoy this chapter way more than my averse-to-groups self originally anticipated when I first joined last year.

After the speeches were over, I had lunch with the people at my table (including two phenoms in the self-publishing world -- my friend Tina and another woman whose publishing name is either Bella or Lucy, depending on what she's writing, although her real first name is something else entirely). Then, I drove back to the evil city and spent some quality time hanging out with Terry. She may not have thought it was quality time, since we ended up watching the last half hour of "King Arthur" when she flipped through the channels and landed there -- yet another half hour of my life lost to the shame and crawling misery of knowing that I so eagerly anticipated that movie and was so bitterly disappointed, to the detriment of ever getting anyone to go to another movie with me again. Sigh. We eventually went to Starbucks and got coffee, and then we came home and I locked myself in my room the rest of the night (with a brief excursion downstairs to get a Diet Mountain Dew out of the fridge).

The writing is going okay, but I certainly didn't write nonstop for the past six hours, much to my chagrin. I did finally figure out what was blocking me, though, and once I figured that out, I made progress pretty quickly. I pray that tomorrow will continue along that line (the line where I progressed quickly, not the line in which I was blocked), but surely sleep will help. Goodnight!