Day 8. Plugging away. 16,306 words.

I went back to work today and it pretty much wore me out. So I didn't have a lot of energy for writing. I also bought Scrivener today because I wanted to try it out for work - it's only $40 with the academic discount and it seemed worth it. When I opened it up at home, I decided I needed to put my novel into it, and that actually took about an hour. It's organized into chapters and within chapters, into scenes, and it's actually really helpful for me to see how the sections of the chapters fit together. I never really give much thought to making chapters, and now when I look at them I can see how they fit, reorganize in different ways (mostly by adding new chapters) and just in general get a better birds' eye view of the whole thing.
How do other folks decide when to include chapter breaks?
Anyway, as far as writing, I knew I wasn't going to get anything brilliant done. I had a few small scenes to write before I could get to the good part, and I decided to send Seth and Hagrid to Jackie's Place for their date, primarily so I could rip off my food descriptions from last year. I won't bore you by excerpting it again, but let me just say that the baked beans were divine.

There's nothing very noteworthy in this excerpt, so I'll just leave you with a bit of Boo!-bie Mansion. Unfortunately, there are no nice Jude Law pictures that seemed appropriate, so instead I will give you a picture that comes up in Google Image when you search for "Jane Austen drunk." (Because the Olivia in the excerpt is Olivia Darcy.)

In the Boo!-bie Mansion, hours fly by like minutes. Which was fantastic, because I was having an amazing time with Olivia, getting lots of free advice that neither of us would remember the next morning. But it was also terrible, because even though this free advice was all about dating, I somehow forgot that I had a date with Hagrid planned for that very night. 

I only remembered my date when I came back from the bathroom, which you will thank me for not describing in more detail, as the bathrooms were the second-most terrifying part of the Boo!-bie Mansion. The most terrifying part, of course, was the hangover that every patron would inevitably wake up with the next morning, or perhaps afternoon. In some cases, early evening. The hangover was in the distant future for me, though, and when I stumbled back to our table, Olivia was slumped over with her hair in the cauldron. She was giggling, for no apparent reason, but this made sense since we had both been giggling uncontrollably for what felt like forever.

“Your phone was zapping!” She held out my phone to me. “Zapping. Zipping. Zappity-zap!” The phone dropped on the floor, and I spent a few moments crawling around on the sticky cobblestones (which I didn’t think were typically an indoor decorating choice) until I found it. I looked at the little screen and saw a message from my calendar, reminding me that I was meeting Hagrid in 15 minutes. In fact, the message had been sent a few minutes ago, so I really had something like 11 minutes to get myself together, get back to the apartment, and prep for this date.