hurts so good

As much as I would like to be getting actual work done, I spent most of today getting ready for my upcoming conference. That means laundry, trying on clothes, evaluating whether there's anything I need, etc., etc....all made more complicated by the fact that I don't have a home. But I brought a ton of clothes here in the back of my car for exactly an exercise such as today's, and I've mostly pieced together what I need to take (dresses and fun hot-weather clothes for Orlando next week, followed immediately by cool-weather clothes suitable for lounging and walking dogs and writing in Berkeley).

However, I still spent a lot of time running errands today. I first went to the coworking space and worked for a couple of hours, but then I snuck out to meet Katie at the mall for some retail therapy. I was v. v. good and didn't buy the sunglasses I tried on (there's sadness in my heart tonight), but I found some pajama/lounge bottoms on sale at Nordstrom, and I also picked up some shampoo/conditioner at the Aveda store, and I picked up the bras I'd ordered yesterday via the Nordstrom anniversary sale. I still have to go to a different Nordstrom tomorrow to pick up something else, but all in all, this was fairly efficient.

Of course, it was lovely to sneak out for a lunch break with Katie - while I expect that she'll tire of my evil influence at some point, so far she seems quite willing to keep hanging out with me, so I'm milking it for all it's worth. We eventually parted ways and I came back to the coworking space, with a stop at Chipotle for lunch (hopefully sans salmonella, although that would help me to lose the weight I put on in London/Venice/general springtime shenanigans). I worked for awhile longer (mostly photoshop), and then I took off for good to get a massage. It was the first massage I've had since Bali, and I felt like my neck really needed it - my neck has been better than I was expecting when it flared up on Sunday, but I'm trying to be super careful with it. I think I liked the massage, although she went super deep on some tender areas - if I die of a punctured artery in my sleep, I blame her.

But all in all it felt great, so I came home and tried to extend the bliss. There wasn't much bliss to be had, since I had to try on clothes and do laundry and take care of kitchen matters - but I did take some time to watch two episodes of 'Great British Bake Off', which was so very British that it was almost ridiculous how British it was. And now I'm desperate for sleep - goodnight!

a candidate for my soulmate bled

I had another long, brutal day in the word mines....Rafe and Octavia's story is coming out of my veins now, in long, slow, steady fountains, and I'm totally tapped out by the time I crawl into bed. Again, I didn't write as much as I wanted to - and again, I need to remember that my expectations of myself are always highly unrealistic, and I'm actually pleased with what I did write (both in quality and quantity).

I spent the morning avoiding the pain of the page, and so I went to a diner down the road to eat something other than the hotel's offerings for the first time since Wednesday. The corned beef hash at Breakaway was decent, but it's no Saul's in Berkeley (which I will have to continue to visit even if John and Jess move away from the east bay - but luckily that will never happen, so my love for Saul's (and them) is safe). Then I went to Starbucks for a change of scene and did a couple of hours of work - this wasn't producing words, but was instead analyzing the effectiveness of some facebook ad testing that I was doing. The end analysis seems to indicate that I am spending too much per click and so am unlikely to break even on the ads, even though it's done good things from a visibility/brand standpoint, so I paused the ads until I can do a deeper analysis and perhaps tweak things to improve my CPC. But for a first effort, it was a good attempt, and I have some ideas for how to improve going forward...

...but marketing should be on the backburner until I finish this fucking book. I spent the afternoon in the lobby writing/messing around, and then I came back to my room and actually wrote - but then I watched the end of the Iowa State game, which was a great break. And then I procrastinated some more before going down to the bar, where I had a salad and some wine and some chocolate and was generally quite productive. Granted, I went down some internet rabbit-holes and ended up having a ridiculous text conversation with Katie as a result, but that was all positive in the end.

And now I think I need to sleep - I wanted to keep writing tonight, but I'm past the point of feeling coherent, and I have to pack and leave at some point tomorrow, so getting enough sleep to survive the drive back (likely in the rain) is important. Goodnight!

the broken places

I had a fabulous day, but now I'm utterly wiped out and in desperate need of sleep. My grand plan last night to get drunk and fall asleep early was foiled by the fact that I don't sleep well when I've been drinking or when I'm sleeping somewhere other than my bed - oops. Also, I tried to go to sleep at the equivalent of eight p.m. in California, so it just wasn't happening. I slept v. fitfully all night, woke up at 7:30 (aka 4:30 in California), and knew that I was in for a v. messed up day...

But I showered, dressed, dolled myself up, and was good to go when Ritu returned from her overnight shift at the hospital. She had picked up breakfast for us, so we ate and caught up until it was time for me to leave for my train and for her to go to bed. I made it to my train with five minutes to spare (and with a latte in hand as fuel against my inevitable descent into decrepit exhaustion) and managed to score a seat on the river side of the train. And by river side I mean that for the entirety of the two-hour train ride that I took up north to see my agent, the train ran alongside the banks of the Hudson River. It was quite possibly the most gorgeous thing ever; so gorgeous that it made me want to abandon the west coast and move to a small town in upstate New York. Or a small town anywhere; I'm actually not really a fan of cities, a realization I have repeatedly and then choose to ignore when I remember that cities are home to mojitos and the country is home to Miller Lite.

sssanyway, I got to the town where my agent and I were meeting around 12:30, and we had a v. lovely afternoon. She bought me lunch at an awesome Italian restaurant, where we both had gluten-free pasta and white wine, and then we had ice cream down the street (where I had peppermint chip, which tasted so much like the peppermint ice cream we always got from the Schwan man at Christmas when I was a kid, at which point my agent and I discussed how we can't talk to anyone else about the Schwan man because no one knows what/who he is). Agent lady had been afraid that we would have to stop hanging out at that point since she had been expecting some calls, but her work load was lighter than she expected, so she drove me the thirty minutes out to her office so that I could see where she works and say hi to her assistant. And the office was *amazing* - on a gravel road, in a house that looks sort of like a converted barn, with acres and acres of rolling hills and woodlands with a view of the Catskills in the distance. I'm so freaking jealous. And the assistant was smart enough to put my books on display as though they're always front and center, even though I know better - but it was sweet anyway.

And then she drove me back to the train, I nursed a tea in the hopes that it would wake me up (failure), and then I spent two hours alternating between dozing and looking out at the countryside on the way back to New York. I had intended to write on the train today, but I got absolutely nothing done beyond drooling over the scenery. When I got back, I spent half an hour talking to Ritu, who then left for her overnight shift; then I ignored all her suggestions of cool places to eat and grabbed food at Chipotle, since it was three blocks away, reliably gluten free, and wouldn't require me to make any decisions or interact with anybody or try to look put together. And now, after having done a wee bit of work, I'm going to go to bed and hope that my attempts at sleep are rewarded tonight - goodnight!

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!

anything goes

Editor's note: we would like to apologize for a typo in last night's post. The name of Mario Batali's Michelin-starred restaurant is "Del Posto", not "Del Postoperative". Our phone's autocorrect has a sense of humor. We now return you to your regularly scheduled daily drivel.

I had a totally lovely day at the romance conference; it feels like I've been here forever, even though it hasn't even officially started yet. I managed to wake up shortly after seven, shower, and make it down to the lobby in time to do some work before the event I was attending this morning (although work was slowed down by running into people, which was v. nice). The event was also excellent -- it was a retreat from 9:30am to around 3:00pm, featuring a couple of interesting agent/editor panels and plenty of time to mingle with a lot of people I know. Sadly, lunch featured little tea sandwiches, and each of the three sandwiches featured an ingredient that I despise (salmon with horseradish, ham with asparagus, and cucumber with dill). I actually don't despise horseradish, but I don't love it; asparagus makes me want to vomit; and dill causes post-traumatic stress flashbacks of my first six weeks in Ukraine when I was twelve and dill was in season. It's quite rare for me to run into so many things I hate, since those are basically the only three foods I refuse to eat (I guess I also refuse to eat tripe, but that's not something you run into often), so I was undernourished all day.

But, the panels were good, although one of the agents was a huge bigshot in the publishing world who, in my mind, completely undermined his expertise and arguments by repeatedly saying that people still 'buy movies on CD-ROM'. For one, no one says CD-ROM anymore, let alone buys them. For another, movies don't come on CDs. And for a third, no one buys movies on DVD either. Needless to say, I was unimpressed with someone who should have wowed me, although I thought a lot of people on the panel were quite savvy and are obviously thinking hard about the future of the business.

After the retreat, I came up to my room to kick off my totally fabulous ruby heels and trade them for some almost-as-fabulous blinged-out sandals. Then, I had drinks with the other finalists in my category, which was lovely even though I'm pretty convinced that I'm not going to win and the competitive part of me is trying to claw its way out of the box in which I've locked it so that it can destroy them all, so the stress of keeping my inner competitive demon tranquilized was tiring. So, I recovered from that + a large martini by taking a nap. I should clarify that the group really is wonderful, and I enjoyed spending time with them, and I will leave it at that before my gushing starts to sound insincere (which it is not).

After my nap, I met up with the '09 finalists (the Ruby Slippered Sisters) in the lobby, and we had a two-hour dinner at an Italian restaurant called Becco, which is conveniently a couple of blocks away from the hotel. It was wonderful to see them, and I sat at a table with a lot of women I adore, so I had a great time. We followed it up with drinks in someone's room, and now I'm probably keeping my roommate awake by typing, so I should go to sleep. The conference starts in earnest tomorrow, and I have no idea what workshops I'm attending, so I should probably figure that out in the morning. Goodnight!