Carrots on Sticks

As I was walking home from yoga class with my best friend last night (did I mention that she moved to town — literally down the street from me, and it puts a smile on my face every day to think that?), clutching our fruit smoothies (a post-yoga class tradition of ours) while simultaneously wearing a fleece jacket, it occurred to me that glorious DC summer is over and we’ve hit that time of the year — even more glorious DC autumn — that will all too soon give way to miserable winter.

I am not a fan of winter. And it lasts forever here. Grrrr…. thinking about how much I hate winter in DC makes me wonder how I ever survived four years in Connecticut. Anyway, right now the weather is overcast and I have to spend the afternoon outside with the monkeys (still preferable to DC winters) and I’m really looking forward to enjoying the remainder of fall. Pretty sure when I get back from Florida it’s already going to have started getting icky…

Oh, and hey, congratulations to Scott Westerfeld, who is on the NYT Bestselling list THREE TIMES this week. Go Scott! (I’m waiting to read Extras until this revision thing dies down.)

So I’m at that inevitable stage of working on other projects where I get all these glorious ideas for new projects that appeal to me so much more than, say, doing revisions. Of course, I’m also at that stage where rearranging my closet is more appealing to me than revisions. It’s part of the process, I’ve found. I’m not alone in this. I remember attending a writing conference back in high school and listening to an author talk about how she tricked herself out of that stage and forced herself to finish writing the book at hand. She promised herself she could work on the other project next. I’ve tried that, with mixed results. I think it’s because usually, when I’m tricking myself into something, I can see right through me.

Bitchslapping myself works a lot better, in my experience.

Hey, check it out — I got curious about that author and what she’s doing now, and here is her website. Sally Keehn was one of the first authors I ever met. her new book sounds adorable.

In personal news, I got my hair cut yesterday. The Great Diana Grows Her Hair Out Experiment is at an end, thank goodness. It’s weird. I had long long LONG hair for practically my whole life, but when I cut it all off at 23, it was like I realized that I was actually not a long hair kind of person. I feel so much more comfortable when my hair is not long. Despite all the cool things I can do with long hair (I know more kinds of braids and twists and inverted herringbones and other hairdos that sound more like gymnastic routines than you can imagine), I was actually a short haired person inside, all along, just waiting to come out and rock a lot less hair. Plus, what I save on brushes and barrettes…

And I guess it turns out that my hair doesn’t grow very quickly, either, since it can’t seem to get much past my shoulders anymore. It didn’t when I was living in Australia and it didn’t all this year. (see picture from the post from the other day.) So now it’s short again, la la la. I’m considering hacking even more off after the wedding, seeing if I’m actually a pixie cut person in secret.