So it turns out iTunes kept all the Cyrillic after all!  It just, for some reason, duplicated some files and some of those were in the wrong alphabet, so I’ve deleted them and all looks well again.  Now I’m adding more CDs into my expanded hard drive (yay!), currently James Brown’s greatest hits.  I’m in a lovely mood : ) [br][br]
George and I choreographed our wedding first dance today.  It’s a particular type of Brasilian dancing/music called Forro.  When done expertly, it’s incredibly fast, sexy and intimidating, frankly, if you’re a beginner.  When done by us (to quite a slow song, so it’s more like a Latin waltz of sorts), it’s not quite as impressive as that, but it’s definitely sweet and a lot of fun.  So now we’re trying to rehearse the timing.  It’s a 4-minute song and we worked out the first half nicely.  It’s just the ending, trying to coordinate when we do this final spinning sequence at the end (actually, if not compared with the fast version, I’m sure it IS impressive to people who don’t know how to do it) with the ending singing.  We haven’t figured out the right musical cue for when to start.  But considering we sorted out the first half in a half hour today, I’m sure we can sort out the second half in this week.  [br][br]
We have ‘til Sunday to work it out at least reasonably well, because then we’re going to the club where our dance instructor (who says we’re her friends, so she’s not charging us for the tuition!  We’ve been going to that club for about a year, off and on, and she teaches a weekly class and usually has the teach the same thing every time because it’s always a different crowd, but we turned out to be her only regulars, so I think she enjoyed actually progressing with us), and we have to show her what we’ve come up with and have her give us tips for improvement.  [br][br]
One problem is: I keep being told I’m too tense.  Last week she actually took my arm and started flopping it about to try and loosen me up.  It was so funny to me, I couldn’t feel annoyed, but really I know a lot of this tension is just due to Tourette’s.  George has forever told me I seem incredibly tense, even just sitting watching TV.  He used to worry about it, but now he knows me well enough to believe me when I say I’m not aware, I feel just fine, I can’t control my body language a lot of the time.  But you know…I’m trying to work on controlling it, for the sake of this dance, because the last thing I want is to look at our homemade wedding video and see me looking rigid and awkward on such a happy day.[br][br]
On another note…I finished my proper official first draft of this novel I’ve been writing for nine years, ‘The Ladder’.  I have finished many drafts before, but I could always tell they were rubbish, so they don’t count.  This time, I can tell it still needs plenty of work, but at least I think it’s a very good start, so I’m calling this the first draft.  I’ve had a lot of helpful comments from George and my mom.  I don’t plan on acting on them yet, though, because I’ve been looking at that book for so many months now, I need a rest.  I’m going to leave it for a long time, then go back to it with a fresh head.[br][br]
So now I’m on the writing buzz and I’m going to rewrite the first‘ real’ story I ever wrote (I was 12), ‘The Dream Writer’.  It’s had so many other titles before, but this one’s going to stay.  It’s really such a good plot, if I may say so myself, and it really does have such a clever ending.  I mean, I feel it would be an injustice not to write this story properly because I love the ending so much.  The trouble was that the actual events propelling the story along just made no sense, they were so implausible.  I mean, I WAS 12, after all.  And for years I just couldn’t think how to make it work realistically.  Then, on Friday, I sat down on a bench in Paddington Street Gardens, opening my bag to get the book I’m currently reading (‘Tomorrow’ by Graham Swift), only to realise I’d put it in another bag in the office and left it behind, and all I had with me was my notebook.[br][br]
So I was FORCED to plan out this story, which I think is exactly what I needed.  I just stopped and considered the problems with the plot…and then all at once it just hit me how to fix it.  I couldn’t believe how clever the alterations were, actually.  I mean, it felt like I didn’t have to think it up at all; the ideas were just lying dormant inside, waiting for me to bother looking at them.  They even felt like the original story had been designed for its new and improved plot, all along.  I know that doesn’t sound possible, but…well, it’s hard to explain without getting into the nitty gritty of what the book is actually about, which I don’t want to do, here.  But yes…I took out my pen and jotted down a couple ideas, and then just did my usual ‘logic’ (if this, then that, and then that, etc.) and suddenly I was late back from my lunch break because I’d got so involved in my plan, the ideas just wouldn’t stop. [br][br]
And just now, I took a look at my last rewrite of the book, trying to work out how on earth to amalgamate my new ideas with the decent bits that are already there (I thought there’d be very little, but it turns out there’s quite a lot of worthwhile material there!), and it hit me that chapter one is currently quite good…and chapter two actually begins with something that, when broken down, really just says ‘and then some time passed and now we’re 8 months on, here’s what happens’ – which is terrible!  But it’s fabulous news, really, because all my plans are just MADE to slot into that previously ignored passage of time.[br][br]
I sort of can’t believe how easy this is turning out to be, after all the years of stressing about it, all the years of confusion.  But then again, I also know I couldn’t have resolved the problems without having discovered more about myself first, my psychiatric conditions, the true nature of them, what they signify about me as a person, that sort of thing.  All of a sudden, I know what I’m writing.  And the best part of it all is that ‘The Ladder’ had a message, it was all so SERIOUS, but ‘The Dream Writer’ is pure entertainment – pure clever twist entertainment with a bit of dark humour here and there.  I’m just going to have SO MUCH FUN writing this book.  I’m so excited!  Everything seems to be coming together, at last.[br][br]
And halfway through uploading a David Bowie collection into iTunes, I must leave this entry to make a phone call I’ve had planned for days, which I’ve felt anxious and nervous about, but also excited and anticipatory.