We Are The Champions Of Writing And Running

I really recommend that everyone watch this. I certainly have been, to get the inspiration that I need to write break-up scenes.

My day started off victoriously, with a great run with Jackie in the Dirty Dash. On the way home we listened to the Queen classic "We Are The Champions," and nodded and squinted the whole way. This really set the tone for my writing session today. I wrote out a list of things that still need to happen in the next 18,000 words, and it is a long one. Eight major things, to be exact. I will really have to pick up the pace.

I introduced another character today, who is based off of the Colonel Fitzwilliam character in Pride and Prejudice (Darcy's cousin who reveals that it was Darcy who broke up Bingley and Jane). Here is my description of him:

Andrew Williams seemed like the kind of guy who had the funds to call someone else to fix a flat tire, but would do it himself anyway because he was the kind of man who was very conscious of the fact that he was a man. He could pick out a decent pair of pants after years in the magazine industry, but he made sure to pair it with a flannel plaid shirt just to make sure that no one would think him any less manly. He would order the half-pound burger to satisfy the “men love meat” trope, but be sure to get it with a salad so that he didn’t feel too guilty about it. It didn’t represent a fear of the feminine or the non-heterosexual per se; it was more his excessive attention to the opinions of others that consciously dictated his choices. It was more a sign that he wasn’t very sure of himself, and was still figuring out who he was, than anything else.

This is the last thing to happen in my novel. Tons of big things are coming, so I'm not sure why I'm stalling.

Busy people like Henry F. Darcy III aren’t able to stay in one place for very long, as there are always dozens of people vying for their attention, and hundreds of places that they can be that are better than with you, doing more important things that you are doing. Darcy soon rushed off to meet several eminent people for lunch, and Olivia rushed off to the Through The Five Hole offices, hoping to catch a glimpse of a fit athlete, or even just to fish out a jock strap from the trash.

But before they hustled off to perform their various tasks, Andrew told Olivia that he had found her insights to be quite useful, and he asked for her card so that he could contact her if he had any further questions. Now, for the uninitiated, this is very much like asking someone for their number, but in a less direct way, as it could just come across as a business interest and nothing more. Olivia is initiated, however. But unfortunately for her, she was not important enough to earn any business cards; she preferred the traditional method of writing her phone number on people’s arms using pens, lipstick, or a muddy stick. For some reason, she didn’t think that it would be appropriate to ask him to roll up his sleeves. Instead, he settled on giving her his business card instead. It seemed to be a much better compromise.

Olivia and Fernando had broken up one week ago. If you had asked Olivia, however, she would have said that they had broken up six days, 17 hours, and approximately 14 minutes ago. Not that she cared too much about it or anything. She had perfect time; some could have even called her the “Human Metronome,” because she was always on time. Perhaps punctuality is slightly different from rhythm, but you get the idea. And by the way, she wasn’t crying. She just had something in her eye, okay?

She was trying to be strong; not just for herself, and the fact that her self-image just wouldn’t recover if she fell apart over some Anglo-Spanish traveling d-bag, but also for Ellie. Since Olivia couldn’t quite forgive herself for not having been there when Bigsley had first broken up with her, she knew how important it was that she be there for her now.

To any outsider, Olivia might have seemed to be completely over Fernando. She wasn’t hoarding chocolate and crying while singing “I’ll Stand By You.” When “Fernando” by ABBA came on the radio at work, she had been just as productive as ever, not heading off to the loo for a crying and screaming. She had only listened to Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed To Live Without You” once or twice, but in private, using headphones. She had watched Bridget Jones’s Diary and cried, worried that she could identify with the hapless post-feminist heroine Bridget a little too much. This was all in secret, of course. That shit will basically kill your reputation.

The only way that one might have seen the struggle that she was experiencing would be to look at her eyes. The dark circles under them told the story of the long and sleepless nights that she had spent wondering about what it was that she had done wrong, or what she could have done differently so that he wouldn’t have been so repulsed by her that he had to break up with her. The hardest thing for her to accept was that he had gotten to know parts of her that she didn’t let most people see, and had run away. As her new idol Bridget Jones said, “When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you’ve created together collapses, and that everything you see or do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts which adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed-over British Rail sandwich?” She had eaten a British Rail sandwich once, and only once, during her day trip to Liverpool to attend the Matthew Street Music Festival. Much like Molly Ringwald when she’s dehydrated, it was pretty gross. That basically summed up how she felt at this point.

No, Andrew Williams was not going to be one of the greatest loves of her life. She did not expect that, she did not want that, and even if she did, she couldn’t give him anything anyway. But the thought that someone seemed to be interested in her was too intoxicating to resist at this point. She felt lower than she had ever felt before; not just because she had scared Fernando away with impressive speed, but also because she now fully understood what she had done to Alejandro. She didn’t feel like she deserved to be loved. If someone was crazy enough to like her, however, who was she to stop them?

Andrew got in touch with her soon enough through e-mail, hoping that he could “bounce some ideas off of her.” She immediately decided that ideas would be the only thing that he would be bouncing off of her, but she still agreed to meet him at a café that was roughly equidistant between their offices.