On this day, a year ago, I was in Bath, England with Cass.  I was very cold even though the sun was shining. You see, not only am I a stereotypical Southern California girl in that I am only comfortable in weather above 68 F, but in order to pay for the trip I had first stopped over in Washington DC to do a few photoshoots (and see my sis-in-law, but she didn’t pay for my ticket, so that’s irrelevant, no matter how fun she is); and in my haze of leaving her apartment for the airport I left my coat on her couch.

People without Southern Californians in their life might not understand the significance of this, because surely, knowing I was sensitive to weather, I had brought warm clothing? You don’t understand! I don’t have warm clothing.  They don’t even really sell warm clothes here – unless it’s for camping at like REI. I had struggled to find shirts with sleeves to pack and, in the end, had not bothered because, hey! I had a coat… well had being the operative word.

SO, first thing on the agenda when we got to Bath was to find me a coat.  Of course they weren’t selling warm clothes either because they thought the weather was perfectly lovely. Which, ok, it looked like this, so judge me how you must:

SO, after wandering through shops of Spring clothes for a couple hours, I FINALLY found a coat in the sale section of Banana Republic – discounted to just 20 pounds.  To give you an idea of how little I’m exaggerating that no one else in town was looking for coats, the first coat I tried on had a spider in it.

I’m talking a lot about this coat, which might seem weird since the other thing that happened on this day a year ago was that Cass and I started outlining the plot for our book.  But you see, I was worried about freezing to death and whining during my time there. I was not worried about writing this book.  In fact, I wasn’t sure why Cass thought it was going to take so long.  By my calculations it would take us three weeks (tops) to write it; tack on an extra week for tweaking and proofreading and we’d be golden.

Yes, yes, laugh all you want, but I had reason to to be confident.  Cass and I had alot of experience co-writing.  She does everything brilliant, but she especially does everything that I hate writing brilliantly.  We have a rhythm where when we’re stuck or sick of a scene we just toss it over to the other person.  It’s awesome.  I didn’t have a care in the world… except buying a coat.  This coat to be precise:

Isn’t it awesome?