it's the little things that kill

Man, Nick and Ellie are killing me. They're actually going well...but they're way more intense than my first two books, and I'm back to writing fresh scenes (to replace a few scenes I extensively rewrote/cut), which is always the hardest part. Seriously, writing something new is probably the hardest thing about writing, even if it's theoretically what writing is all about. Ugh.

Anyway, I made good progress today, even though I spent the morning dealing with business stuff and the evening procrastinating on nytimes.com (I need to cancel that thing). The business stuff was mostly fun, and included looking at cover images; my agent and I are going to redesign my covers, and so I was working with the cover designer to choose the right stock photo to capture Nick and Ellie's intensity. Then I had lunch at some cafe down the street, then worked in the Carmel library for a bit, until a woman who was talking to herself and an elderly man who kept getting phone calls with his 'Call Me Maybe' ringtone conspired to drive me crazy. So I left the library and came back to my hotel to write...but they're apparently replacing the roof on the building across the courtyard from my window, and I couldn't concentrate with all the hammering.

So I left Carmel and drove a few miles to Monterey so that I could work at a Starbucks. The place smelled strongly of body odor in some areas, but the earl grey was tasty and I wrote several pages of a new scene in longhand, which helped me to get back on track. Then I grabbed supper at Chipotle (yum), came back, procrastinated, made a fire in the fireplace, typed up what I'd written before, and then finished that scene and edited the next two or three for continuity. I'm now getting close to the end; I need to write 2.5 more new scenes, I think, and I hope to do them tomorrow. Since I leave Carmel Friday, I'm hoping to be done with all the new stuff by then so I can spend the weekend proofreading, line editing, and formatting. Yay fun times, right? But now, I should sleep so I can hit it hard tomorrow - goodnight!