Patti O'Shea's Blog

There’s nothing like starting out the day by oversleeping. I know I heard the alarm, but I must have hit the off button instead of the snooze. I woke up at 4:40 and had to run. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, I go to the computer in my office while I’m waiting for coffee and a spider crawls down the center of my screen! Ugh! I hate spiders!

I looked around, found something to kill him with, and squished him–or I tried to anyway. I kind of missed and then I worried that he was on me, like maybe he got on my sleeve or something. I stand up and I’m shaking out my clothes, trying to find him. Then I slid the keyboard forward on the tray and there he was. He didn’t stay there long.

I think I would have been more panicked if I’d been awake, but I was still pretty groggy at that point. That spider was some weird color, though, and moving pretty sluggishly. I wonder what was up with that?

This–fortunately–is only the second spider I’ve had to kill in my house since I moved in. Or maybe the third. They’ve been few and far between, though, and that’s a good thing. The office is one of two rooms I haven’t had a chance to finish unpacking yet, but now I want to. I’m sure if everything were put away, there’d be no spiders.

BTW, I did make it to work on time–barely–and now I’m counting the minutes till I can go home again.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can talk about what I’d planned to blog on this morning. My heroine, Maia, is into clothes. Sigh. I should have had an inkling from the first scene I wrote, but I didn’t figure it out that fast.

Despite what Stacy and Clinton say on What Not To Wear, I firmly believe that comfort is more important than style and I’ve been fortunate enough to have heroines who really didn’t focus on their clothes. Until now.

Maia is one of those casually elegant women, someone who could put on shorts and a T-shirt and still look as if she could attend the opera. One of my cousins is like this. When I was in my early teens, I tried to emulate her, but unfortunately, I’m one of those people who can take forever getting dressed up for some fancy do and ten minutes later look as if I’m going to a baseball game. I’ve learned to accept this, it’s just who I am, but now I need a crash course on clothes.

Last night, I went searching online for Maia’s next outfit. I need pictures! Not just of the clothes, but of someone wearing the clothes, and that’s where the difficulty comes in. A lot of the websites I visited–Land’s End, LL Bean, Gap, Talbot, etc–show the clothes, but most of the pictures don’t have anyone wearing them. Or if they showed a model wearing an outfit, I’d click on the picture to see the whole look in a bigger .jpg and it would zero in on only the shorts. I need to see the top with the shorts, darn it!

This story takes place during a hot, humid August time frame and that’s also playing into the type of clothes. I figure dressy shorts and casual tops that still manage to look dressy on her. Maia would never wear the short-shorts that so many of the sites were showing, not in front of another person, and since Creed has invaded her home, that rules that style out. Maia prefers classic styles, timeless, nothing that’s a fad or too trendy. She also isn’t much for bright colors, she prefers neutral, earth tones. Sigh. I like bright, so I’d see something I’d like, but she’d be unenthused.

So does anyone have any good sites to see clothes? With women wearing them? I’m sure I’ll be doing more searches for outfits as I move forward and I need resources.