Labor Pains

Still need three more comments. Sheesh. And I was going to wax on and on about tattoos today, too.

I have been giving birth for two weeks and this stubborn baby will not come out. I feel like I started this delivery all set to roll with an epidural and then found out my insurance won't cover it and I have to push it out the old-fashioned way or some nonsense like that.

See, I started a new manuscript. I forgot that it's hard to start. It's because I finished my first one in August and by the last month of writing it, I could barely stem the tide of the words. The only reason I didn't do more than 1,500 words a day is because that's as fast as I could type while baby G slept.

I guess I forgot how hard that one was to start, too. Between January and May, I wrote about 32,000 words and in the next two months knocked out about 50,000 more. But that's because I knew my characters. I understood their motivations and exactly how they would react in any situation. I knew what my protagonist needed to experience growth and how her friends and family would contribute to that growth.

But this new baby...you'd think I didn't already have two kids and know to expect the unexpected. My first human baby came two weeks early. My water broke but he didn't want to come out, so after copious amounts of pitocin and about 24 hours, he finally showed up. With a little help from the forceps. Second babies, are so much easier, though. Right? The labor is supposed to be faster, blah blah blah.

Ha.

Baby #2 came five weeks early and gallons of pitocin and 27 hours later, with the midwife tugging like crazy on his head, decided he would come out, too.

Kind of like my manuscripts. This second one has its own distinct personality and even though I thought I had my writing groove down with Click, I am learning this baby has a mind of its own. I started it in first person, tortured out my first two thousand words, and now have discovered that it needs to be third person. This is the, "Ha, ha you have to push this sucker out the hard way" part of the metaphor.

Grr.

I am clinging to the naive hope that it will get easier faster than it did with the first manuscript, but I feel like I'm starting out for the first time again.

In other writing news....this is a picture of me with author Kate Jacobs, author of The Friday Night Knitting Club and a new release, Comfort Food. She came to our local library (which is a kick butt library) and did an author talk. My friend Gina (in the green dress) got Kate to agree to call into our book club next week to talk to us about the book. (We did it for our RS book club this month). And I got a picture with author Jane Porter but I look stupid so I'm not sharing.

And in other other news, a blog update: due to an astonishing number of comments and emails on the subject, I'm reinstituting the seven comment rule. Kind of. There's some stuff that I write (oh, soooooo rarely) that comes from a totally deep and honest place inside me somewhere that I stumble across every now and then, and I would never want to coerce comments on those posts. There's also some really stupid stuff I write about that just can't be commented on unless you live inside my head and understand my fixation on things like goat-riding monkeys. And I won't make you comment on that. But there's a ton of stuff that falls in between and I'll stick to the seven comment rule on those things before I move on. Fair warning...

Also, I'm going to change the color of my blog (maybe green? The pepto bismol pink was a total aberration for me) and maybe the name. I originally wanted to call my blog "No Arithmetic" and I think Write Stuff sounds like I couldn't think of anything else because I started my blog late at night one night when I was out of good ideas and it sounds like that because that's exactly what happened and this is a really long run-on sentence. Any opinions? (Not about the run-on sentence).

Seven comment rule in full effect, y'all.