A dear friend's visit for three days (one of which I was ...

A dear friend's visit for three days (one of which I was at school from 9 am til 10 pm) - including a troll of the LA Garment District, always a sort of third-world souk experience - now I get a day and a half of actual work. You have to grab these when you can, juggling writing with a part-time gig. It's a little difficult to pull the mind back to the place where the story is, but reading CM Long's Mme Lalaurie book helps - it has an amazing sense of time and place, though the particular book I'm working on takes place in Washington rather than New Orleans. A very different world, then.

My friend was assembling components for costuming a "thru the decades" pop music review, so the shopping trip featured terrifying quantities of spandex and rhinestones, but the Garment District is always a hoot. A sign above a shop announced that they had TRIM, FABRIC, RHINESTONES and SEQUENCE. Have you indeed?