but you will come to a place where the only thing you feel are loaded guns in your face

I really must go to bed immediately; tomorrow is a rinse-and-repeat of today, with the added wrench of needing to pick up an agent who's speaking to my romance chapter this weekend at the San Francisco airport and deposit her at her hotel in Emeryville. Boo. But I was quite productive today, if I do say so myself; I woke up just in time for a 9-10am Twitter chat with some fellow historical romance writers, then spent the rest of the morning taking care of some small tasks and writing another guest blog post that should be up somewhere online sometime in the next week or two (this promo business boggles the mind). I also had to [censored] for [censored], which I was happy to do, if only because [censored].

By the time I crossed everything off my to-do list, it was almost three. Perhaps I should have just stayed home then, but I've come to the sad, embarrassing realization that I get more work done if I drive an hour each way to sit in the Stanford library than I do in the comfort and drive-less wonder of my own house. So I drove south, stopped at Philz and worked for an hour or so over coffee, grabbed an early dinner at Chipotle while doing an online chat with another group of writers, and then went to Stanford library and worked from seven to a little after eleven. And I got 15+ pages out of it, so it was worth it, I suppose.

The end is still in sight, and I even managed to salvage half a scene -- shocker. At the rate I'm going, I should be finished with this draft by the weekend. But I hope to have an absolutely brutal, overwhelmingly productive slog tomorrow -- the agent lands at eleven, which means I could be down to Stanford by one or two p.m., which means ten hours of madness. And I'm serious about the madness -- things in my head are heating up when it comes to this book, and they aren't pretty. It's kind of wearing me out, but I fueled myself tonight with rage; someone online (whom I kind of despise anyway) said something that made me absolutely incandescent with anger, which was a little awkward since I was sitting at Chipotle and kept inadvertently glaring at children while I tried to calm down. Oops. Still, haters are gonna hate, right? And it wasn't a review or anything, so it really wasn't a big deal.

Speaking of reviews, Heiress is still doing really well from a review standpoint on the Nook, but its ranking is starting to slide (down to ~900 in the overall B&N store, and #13 in Regency instead of #3). But, it's all a weird game -- I can't tell what drove the sales I got, and I can't tell why it's slipping either. I think a big part of it is that all the new releases for this week came out yesterday and there were some big ones, which means anyone who preordered them got them fulfilled yesterday, which pushed everyone else down. C'est la vie, though; it could still come back, and even if it doesn't, it will hopefully get a bump again when I release Scotsmen. But that won't happen unless I go to bed and hit it hard tomorrow -- goodnight!