Friday Five!

1. This Southern gal has seen her share of hurricanes. Ivan whipped out my hometown in 2004, and then Katrina came through to destroy what we'd fixed in 2005. There's something different, though, about it happening to a place like New York. Whenever the hurricanes hit home, it's awful and devastating, but it's expected. We've been through it before. We'll, unhappily, be there again. But New York always seemed kind of impenetrable to me. I understand that cities can get destroyed--I've read about the Great London Fire, the burning of Atlanta, I saw the effects of Katrina on New Orleans--but this...I don't know. It's different.

I still want to live there one day, though.

2.  Best joke I've heard about the Random House-Penguin merger: Hurricane Sandy let the pengins escape from the zoo, and they wandered into random houses.

It took me two reads to get it.

3. I'm finally at a point in my Work in Progress where I WANT to work on it. A lot. It came from changing the ending and restructuring it. I've got a stronger throughline, and I want to get through it!

This desire to work is not helping my sleep patterns, which have gotten ridiculous. I'm naturally nocturnal, meaning that I'll get my writing wind at almost midnight. My body likes to get nine to ten hours of sleep, meaning that I tend to get up at ten or eleven.  I'm trying to let go of the guilt about this and be productive during my awake hours whatever they are. I don't feel overtired or anything like that, so I don't think it's a problem. Just, nocturnal. But my roommates are both morning people and have entire days before I'm up....

4.  A friend of mine on Twitter mentioned the musical The Last 5 Years yesterday, and a high school friend is in a production in Orlando, so I've been relistening to it today. It's beautiful and really captures what failing relationships can be like, but what I've been focusing on the anachronisms. It's about a protege writer, and in one place they mention "Borders" and then later "Random House," which wouldn't have been an issue until last week. It makes me think about how hard we work to make our books timely, when really we never know what's going to change.

5. We had a 90s Halloween Movie Extravaganza in the apartment from Monday to Wednesday. We'd invited people over, but hurricane, so it ended up being my roommates and me. Occasionally just me. We viewed The Witches, Halloweentown, Casper, Tower of Terror, and, of course, Hocus Pocus. Trends noticed? A lot of famous actresses playing witches. Some pretty bad insults. Screenplays that were much better when you were ten. A lot of kitsch and yelling of "GRANDMAAAAAAA!"

It was wonderful.