This Thursday’s Chicago reading: will be a benefit for Literacy Works and not some other organization, despite what you may have read on a couple of events listings somewhere. Literacy Works does all kinds of fantastically swell stuff like train ESL teachers and volunteer tutors to help adults learn to read, and while presumably the other organization is devoted to good things as well and not, say, into playing cruel literacy-related tricks such as hiding rubber cockroaches in books, tearing out the final pages of mystery novels, and recommending House of Leaves, they are nonetheless not the same organization as Literacy Works, on whose behalf I am reading on Thursday. So come to Hyde Park! And bring ten dollars! Or more!
(It’s hard not to be nervous about the attendance. For most readings, having a lousy turnout simply means that I’m pathetic. When it comes to this reading, a lousy turnout means that PEOPLE WILL BE DENIED THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE THROUGH READING, and that I’m pathetic. So do what you can.)
Last Thursday’s New Jersey reading: was fine, except for all the apocalyptic rain. From my rental car along the Garden State Parkway, New Jersey looked very, er… smeary, though I’m sure it’s way nicer when it’s dry. This state has lovely radio stations, which are great to listen to while you’re trying to find a place to turn around on the highway.
My cold: is much better, thank you. You needn’t have worried at all.
The Beeping Thingy ceased its daily beeping two days after I wrote about it and I KNEW THAT WOULD HAPPEN. I still have no idea what the hell it was.
We did, however, catch a squirrel in my office building today, after the thing came down through the ceiling this weekend and ate some of the office M&M’s. Working for a children’s book publisher means you are always surrounded by enchanted animals. And by “enchanted” I mean “awesomely freaked out on sugar.”
Bootsy the Fish: Still alive after a year and three months. Sort of. He seems to have swim bladder disorder. (Look it up.) From what I’ve read this won’t kill him, but it’s killing me to see him lying listlessly at the bottom of the tank like a junkie, flopping his semi-useless fins around like a thalidomide baby Smurf. I mean, you can’t have a fish “put down,” can you? Something dignified and fast. A tiny harpoon I can shoot into him, maybe.
Weight Watchers: Oh, you shouldn’t ask right now. I’m only mentioning it because I know you want to know, which is my own damn fault for telling you I was doing it again in the first place. You get where I’m going with this? Yeah? There you go. (And this may not be up for discussion, inasmuch as I can control that.)
But never mind that. Most everything else is good.
Posted by Wendy | Tue 10.18.05 04:03 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack | send link
I like reading Miss Snark’s agent blog, because she writes aboout slogging through manuscript submissions, and since I do that for a living too, I feel very productive reading her every morning, even when I’m actually not slogging through submissions and editing half a dozen picture books and two novels in varying stages of production at that particular moment. (Though for the most part I have been doing those things, which is why you haven’t read much here lately.) And I especially like Miss Snark when she addresses some wee itchy little tiny dustmite of a detail about writing or publishing or submissions etiquette that has always bothered me. Like business cards, and whether writers should give them to editors and agents, and vice versa. No, really, this preoccupies me way too much. Cards are swell and cards are dumb. And what the hell kind of opinion is that? Oh, I’LL TELL YOU.
So I have my cards that I use as a writer. Those are swell cards. 95% of the time I give them out to avoid having to scrawl my website urls on a napkin. I also have business cards for my job as an editor. And then I have the twenty thousand cards that people send me with their children's book manuscripts. Often they are lovingly paper-clipped to the corner of the manuscript, which makes me feel even more like a shit for throwing them away when (and yes, it's usually more "when" than "if") I pass on the manuscript. I hope people don't mind that I do this. I hope people aren't under the impression that I organize them in a tiny file cabinet labeled People Who May or May Not Someday Write a Children's Book My Company Can Publish Once I Contact Them at the Addresses and Phone Numbers Listed Herein and Discuss, At Length, the Various Strengths and Weaknesses of Their Writing. But unfortunately I will never have the time to do this, and neither does my assistant, who is very busy not existing.
I suppose it bums me out to get business cards this way because they imply a business relationship, and sadly, the relationship usually only lasts as long as it takes for me to read a three-page picture book manuscript. And then when I throw away their cards? It's like I'm throwing away their WRITERLY DREAMS. That's why I don't like cards sometimes.
When I go to writer's conferences as an editor, I do the same hemming and hawing Snark says she does when writers ask for her business card. I don't love to give mine out because they have my work email address on them. My work address and phone number isn't a guarded secret but my email is my kryptonite. If it were to get into the wrong hands it could CRIPPLE me. With CRAP. Or it would be like opening a huge twitching artery gushing "but WHY isn't it right for your company?" and "I read this aloud to my sister-in-law's Sunday School class and they loved it," and so on, all over my office. You might need to read this to understand why it's bad, but trust me, IT'S BAD. So when a writer asks me for a card, I usually give it to them and ask that they not email me, which of course makes me sound like a total pud, and that's another reason why I don't like cards sometimes.
Once I forgot to bring my cards to a writer's conference where I was speaking. It didn't seem like a big deal to me, since all the attendees had my contact information and everything they needed to know about sending a manuscript to me; it was printed on a nice tidy sheet in their folders. I figured I was off the hook; I'd simply say "I'm sorry, I forgot them," when asked. But from the looks I got from a few people you'd think I'd stomped on their new sandals.
"No?" they'd say, their faces falling.
"Sorry," I'd tell them. "But please feel free to send your story about the swimming pretzel to my attention." I'd recite the address, or I'd point it out in my company's catalog.
"Oh, but if I had your card..." they'd say, and their voices would trail off. And then I knew they wanted a trophy. I imagined a group of them gathering after the conference and comparing the cards they'd scored, stroking them to feel if the letters were embossed. I guess I can understand why some people do this. If someone wants to keep a three-and-a-half-by-two-inch token of hope tacked to their bulletin board, who am I to begrudge them?
It's just weird that my name is on it.
Posted by Wendy | Fri 10.07.05 03:17 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack | send link
Because Kevin Smokler tagged me. And because I went to the lakefront after work instead of writing a real update.
1. How many books I own: I just counted; I have about 400. This doesn’t include my books at work, though most of those are editorial copies that I wouldn’t necessarily claim as my own. And do perfect-bound lit magazines count as books? I didn’t include those, either, though I suppose one could claim that anything with a flat spine is technically a book. But that’s dumb, because then the IKEA catalog counts as a book. Okay, never mind.
2.) The last book I bought: Paradise by A.L. Kennedy. I don’t have it yet. I just ordered it. I couldn’t say which book I bought before that, because it’s a gift, so Paradise by A.L. Kennedy is totally my beard. Plus I really want to read it.
3.) The last book I read: That I finished? And that I wasn’t paid to read? I think it’s The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank.
4.) Five books that mean a lot to me:
1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte
2. The Dream Songs by John Berryman
3. Short Talks by Anne Carson
4. Metamorphoses by Ovid
5. A foreign edition of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever with words in English, Hungarian and German. It belonged to my grandmother. It’s how I know “szalonna” means “bacon,” “szállítókocsi” means “delivery van” and “robot” means “robot.”
5.) Five people I’ve tagged: (Assuming they haven’t been tagged already.)
Marianne
Pinky
Dana
Pamie
Tara
Posted by Wendy | Mon 08.22.05 10:50 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | send link
Because Kevin Smokler tagged me. And because I went to the lakefront after work instead of writing a real update.
1. How many books I own: I just counted; I have about 400. This doesn’t include my books at work, though most of those are editorial copies that I wouldn’t necessarily claim as my own. And do perfect-bound lit magazines count as books? I didn’t include those, either, though I suppose one could claim that anything with a flat spine is technically a book. But that’s dumb, because then the IKEA catalog counts as a book. Okay, never mind.
2.) The last book I bought: Paradise by A.L. Kennedy. I don’t have it yet. I just ordered it. I couldn’t say which book I bought before that, because it’s a gift, so Paradise by A.L. Kennedy is totally my beard. Plus I really want to read it.
3.) The last book I read: That I finished? And that I wasn’t paid to read? I think it’s The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank.
4.) Five books that mean a lot to me:
1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte
2. The Dream Songs by John Berryman
3. Short Talks by Anne Carson
4. Metamorphoses by Ovid
5. A foreign edition of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever with words in English, Hungarian and German. It belonged to my grandmother. It’s how I know “szalonna” means “bacon,” “szállítókocsi” means “delivery van” and “robot” means “robot.”
5.) Five people I’ve tagged: (Assuming they haven’t been tagged already.)
Marianne
Pinky
Dana
Pamie
Tara
Posted by Wendy | Mon 08.22.05 10:50 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | send link
The Redeye article where Flea and I are interviewed is most likely going to come out Monday. But you can read about Ron in the New York Times today. I’m happy that they ran one of my favorite photos from his site.
I was sad to hear that Alicia Frantz passed away on Friday. I’d linked to her Audible Frequency blog a couple years ago, and I’d met her a couple times only in passing, but her site was one of the most interesting weblogs in Chicago. Eric Zorn wrote a wonderful tribute to her on his Chicago Tribune blog and I recommend listening to the strange and moving radio noise recording featured on Gapers Block this week. (Chris, I bet you’d like this. I wish I could have introduced you to her.)
I’m leaving now to drive up to Milwaukee, with an iPod full of songs and a mix tape (an actual cassette tape I can’t wait to listen to.
See you tonight, Wisconsin. I just might read my story from this book.
Posted by Wendy | Wed 06.08.05 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
I hate the key situation. I hate not having keys. It’s not until I travel that I realize how compulsively necessary it is for me to be able to reach for and clutch and stash and dig out my big jangly set of keys. I especially hate that one of the first things I have to do when I leave to go on a trip is bury my keys deep in my bag and pretend they don’t exist for however many days I’m gone. I hate reaching in to find them when I’m almost home and worrying that they’ve suddenly ceased to exist. I hate that when I travel my reassuring handful of keychain is traded for a plastic hotel key card. A card! How the fuck am I supposed to trust a card? It’s barely three dimensional. I put it in my purse and I can practically feel the universe threaten to suck it through any one of its slot-shaped wormholes back into total oblivion.
I do not like that most hotels seem to have Pepsi and not Coke machine. Diet Pepsi in a plastic bottle for $1.50 or more is three kinds of wrong, and it tastes like chemicals and exile.
I wish there was only one kind of alarm clock. Or only one kind for all the hotels in the world. The one this morning had TWO alarm settings and to the best of my ability to decipher the configurations of buttons and light-up dots I thought I'd set them both, but only one went off. I had a wake-up call and I got up anyway, but still, doubt lingers like a silent fart.
Also, how does the "sleep" button work and who are these people who use it?
Also, why is the default alarm setting always on radio mode, and why is it always tuned in at the most ragged edge of an AM frequency, at full volume, spraying big blurts of static and unintelligible newstalk? I keep waking up to what sounds like air traffic controllers attacked by bees.
I like those little folding stands that you use to hold up your luggage. I never used to understand the point of using them, but now in every hotel room I find the stand and open it and haul my suitcase up on it and I feel like a very savvy traveler for some reason.
I think I am seriously dyslexic or otherwise cognitively impaired when it comes to reading those signs in hotel hallways, i.e., "Rooms 301-319-->" The numbers! The arrows! The greater than/less than propostions! Two out of three times I always start out walking in the wrong direction.
I like that I am writing this entry from the Limoliner going from Boston to New York. I checked, and I'm pretty sure that I'm only the 416th person to write a damn blog entry from the Limoliner. Really, it's the pimpingist bus ever. It doesn't have that toilet chemical smell that Amtrak trains totally have, either.
I have new pictures up on the Flickr page. Most of them are of Boston, with a couple of cameraphone pics of the day I spent in Nashua. Note to New Hampshire residents: I'm sorry that the only photos of your state are of a hotel and a gift shop, but I'm afraid that's all I got to see in the very short time I was there. Only a few precious moments there, really.
We just passed a sign for Squantz Pond State Park. Where is that? Are we almost there?
Posted by Wendy | Sun 05.22.05 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
…on the plane to Seattle; in a hotel room in Seattle for four nights; in the same hotel room in Seattle for two totally konked-out hours during the day after an early morning TV thing; in a town car driving from Seattle to Portland; in a hotel room in Portland for about four hours; in the guest bedroom at my friends’ house in Portland for two more totally konked-out hours; in the guest bedroom for three more nights; in a chair at the salon where we were getting pedicures; on the plane from Portland to Denver; on the plane from Denver to Chicago.
Thank you: Laurel and Mark, who put me up in Portland; Pam and Suzanne, who drove me to the Bellevue reading (I will email you!); Linda and Chiara, who hung out with us afterwards; Tiffany Midge, who took the photos at Third Place; Dawn and Jennifer, who took me out for drinks later; Charmaine, who painted my toes I’m Not Really A Waitress Red; Crofton, who helped me not freak out in the green room; Ron, who gave me a ride to the damn airport; everyone who showed up at all three readings; everyone who bought a book or asked a question or just nodded helpfully; all the bookstore folks (Don! Wendy! People at Powell’s!); Brian in Tulsa, for doing such a fun interview; the tattooed chick who cut my hair on short notice on a Sunday; anyone else I’ve neglected to mention.
If you’re in Seattle, you can get signed copies at the downtown Borders, Third Place Books, the University Bookstore Bellevue store, and Elliott Bay Books in Pioneer Square. Portland folks can find signed copies at the Lloyd Center Borders, the downtown Borders (including the “Borders Express,” where I guess all the books can be read more quickly than at the normal Borders); a Borders somewhere around Beaverton (it was a big strip mall); Powell’s.
That sound you just heard was my head hitting the desk. I slept there, too.
Posted by Wendy | Sun 05.08.05 11:50 PM | TrackBack | send link
If my brain could breathe it would be making Darth Vader noises right now. Fwoooh, fwhihhh, fwoooh, fwhihhh. Like that. Fwoooh, fwhihhh, the you-know-what is out; fwoooh, fwhihhh, fwoooh, live TV Tuesday morning; fwoooh, fwhihhh,the reading Wednesday night; fwoooh, fwhihhh, the other reading Wednesday night. Fwoooh, radio Wednesday. Fwihh, radio Thursday. Fwoooh, fwhihhh, fwoooh, Seattle Friday.
Yes: give me a paper bag. For my head to breathe in. And also, just so I can be really, stupidly, annoyingly shy just for a minute, okay? And then I’ll be fine. Fwoooh, thanks. Fwhihhh.
Posted by Wendy | Mon 04.25.05 08:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
…so I sure am glad to get it in your slightly curmudgeonly New York Times article, sir!
Here is the brief mention:
Canvassing the publishers’ catalogs, I was intrigued to see “All in My Head,” by Paula Kamen. It’s about a headache the author has been carrying around for more than a decade. It will do battle on the bookstore shelves with, among many others, “Fat Girl,” by Judith Moore, a memoir of growing up fat and female, which in turn will compete with another fat-girl memoir, “I’m Not the New Me,” by Wendy McClure, which will square off against “Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex, and Salvation,” by Samantha Dunn, who found a new way of life, and a book topic, when she signed up for dance lessons. Then there’s “House,” by Michael Ruhlman. It’s about a house. Is there not something to be said for the unexamined life?
Maybe, but if you had a headache for fifteen years? You’d sure as hell want to examine that. I’m just saying.
Posted by Wendy | Fri 03.25.05 10:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | send link
This article about all the weird things that can happen during book tours and signing events has me alternately excited and anxious about the events of the next few months (and there are about a dozen of them now, holy crap), because besides the usual reasons for being excited and nervous, I think I already have a weird and poignant book-signing anecdote, so God knows what else is going to happen.
The story is this: back in the fall, my friend Dana and I were attending our friend Erin’s wedding, and we were staying at a hotel with another friend of ours. The wedding itself was over by two PM. The reception didn’t start until after six. It was nearly four and we’d already taken a long nap. “Well, I guess we can start drinking now,” one of us said. Okay, so maybe it was me.
Dana went down the hall to get some ice. When she didn’t return after awhile, I peeked outside and found her in the hallway talking to the woman next door. The hotel was part of a casino and there seemed to be a certain anything-goes spirit to the whole place which made it easy to strike up conversations with total strangers.
“They’re making green apple martinis,” Dana said when she’d come back inside. “They said to come on over!” There were three of them: a woman in her thirties with her teenage daughter and her mother, who looked far younger than her years—in my head I called her Grandma Foxy. They were all dark-skinned and gorgeous. The younger two looked more polished in high heels and jeans than we did in our wedding-guest outfits, and the foxy grandmother had a bias-cut dress and a totally amazing weave. They made us drinks and we brought over candy.
The woman our age was single again and her daughter made fun of her for only wanting to date white men. Grandma Foxy mentioned matter-of-factly that she had incurable brain cancer. “Nothing I can do,” she said, “but just enjoy myself.” I loved her after about five minutes of conversation. We all loved each other after about five minutes of conversation. The women lived nearby but they had come here for a “girl’s weekend,” they said. They were going to dinner at a fancy steak house later on, they said, and maybe we could meet them after the wedding reception.
Dana and Ericka and I looked at each other. Hell yeah! we were thinking. We wanted to meet them later; we wanted to be their best friends; we wanted to buy them bottles of champagne and designer handbags. We wanted to change our whole lives. But what time did we have to leave for the reception? When did we have to check out? We let our neighbors add more vodka to our plastic cups.
“Wendy has a book coming out,” my friend Ericka told them. “A book!” exclaimed Grandma Foxy. I explained that I had just turned in the manuscript and it would be out in the spring. I tried to tell them what it was about but I was having a really hard time. I wished I had a copy and could just give it to them. “Will we be able to buy your book?” they asked. Yes, I told them, in a bookstore and everything.
“Well,” said Grandma Foxy, “you are just gonna have to sign our book for us.” Sure, I told her. “So
will you sign it?” she asked. Well, yeah, I said. Maybe she didn’t understand that it wasn’t out yet. “Okay!” she said, and she walked across the room to the dresser and got something out of her bag. “She’s going to sign the book for us,” she told her daughter.
She handed me a big, thick hardcover book. It was My Life by Bill Clinton. It looked almost new.
“I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s very good,” she said. And then she fished a pen out of her purse and gave it to me.
“Oh, gosh, I can’t sign this,” I said. I was a little drunk. And this was the memoir of our former president. “Are you sure?” I asked.
Oh yes, they said. They insisted.
I opened it up to the title page. The paper felt expensive and I could feel the binding yield just a little. I heard myself say, “Now how do you spell your name?” as if I’d always known to ask that.
I wrote “Dear” and wrote her name, which unfortunately I’ve forgotten by now. “It has been an honor to spend this time with you and your beautiful family. Best wishes to you all.” I wanted to write more, but it wasn’t my book. It was written by someone else; it belonged to this woman I knew I’d never see again, because of course Dana and I would stay at the reception until it ended, and when we got back to the hotel it would be too late to do anything except kick off our shoes and change for bed and sleep off all the wine. All the same, I signed the book with my name and it almost felt right. Or at least not all that wrong.
Posted by Wendy | Tue 03.08.05 02:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
Did you see how Margaret Atwood went and invented this thing that signs books from a remote location? No, really: Margaret Atwood totally invented a robot arm that signs books. That’s just surreal. Wouldn’t it be great if writers just did that stuff all the time? Like if David Foster Wallace just came up with some crazy precision laser beam that can render legible footnotes in microscopic -15pt type, or Tom Wolfe devised an electromagnetic wand to detect irony in sex scenes? Personally I would improve on the
book-signing invention by solving the women-writers-can’t-get-male-groupies problem at the same time. That’s right—I would build a Book-Touring Femmebot, with Realdoll parts and NPR personality. Among its many features it would adminster a stun-gun-like shock to anyone who says something like, “So your book, it’s really just chick lit, right?” or “Why aren’t you on Oprah?”
Posted by Wendy | Fri 01.14.05 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
Dear trade paperback sales representatives, editorial and marketing staff at Riverhead Books and Penguin Putnam, booksellers, wholesalers, library buyers, book club people, members of the media, and maybe even Ira Glass, as well as various friends and family members of all of the aformentioned, and anyone else who happens to have a bound galley of my book:
Hello! And thank you for agreeing to read an advance copy of I’m Not the New Me! Or, if you didn’t explicitly agree to reading the book, for continuing to do whatever extremely sexy job you do for a living that requires you to read galleys night after night. At any rate, I hope all of you enjoy reading your galley of I’m Not the New Me, my first book.
Please note this advance edition is FOR LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOT FOR SALE, as indicated in the block letters on the bright red banner on the front cover, and in the two red banners on the back cover. You may also be aware that this is an UNCORRECTED MANUSCRIPT. While I understand that those of you who read galleys are well accustomed to seeing numerous print and even factual mistakes at this stage of the pre-publication process, and that really, you don't mind if you can see where I drooled random punctuation and half-assed grammar all over the keyboard and where nobody bothered to clean it up for God's sake, I am more than a tad mortified. And I know that reading the galley for a book is a lot like watching a dress rehearsal for a play, but all the same you’d hope the lead actress shaved her legs that day. Therefore I have begun to compile a list of all the typos and factual errors appearing in the galley edition of I'm Not the New Me in the hopes doing so will make your reading experience as pleasant as possible. Thank you. --WM
p. 3: We will fix that bad break at the top of the page. I mean, Jesus.
p. 41: There really should be commas after "thought" in Line 10 and "office" in Line 11.
p. 50: On the very last line on that page, the use of punctuation outside the word in quotation marks is wrong, unless you happen to be British. Then again, if you are British, the quotation marks are the wrong kind anyway. So I think the correct punctuation for the word in question, depending on who you are, can be " 'shitty,' " or ' "shitty",' or maybe even 'shitty', but definitely not " "shitty",."
pp. 65-67, 69 Not sure if we can legally use the word "Slurpee" in this context. They're checking.
p. 81: Lines 1, 2 and 4 should be in italics.
p 115: In Paragraph 2, the part that says "driving west towards the sun" is incorrect. Because I'm driving from Chicago to Pennsylvania in this chapter and going, you know, EAST. The corrected passage should say "driving east towards the sun," and the scene in question should take place in the morning, even though technically it didn't, because The Chicago Manual of Style does not advise reversing the earth's rotation unless absolutely necessary.
p. 124, Line 1: I said "Louisville" but I meant "Knoxville." You may have noticed that Louisville is not in Tennessee. Sorry. Knoxville. God.
p. 114: Typo in the first line, as I did not intend to actually say "anyβ."
p. 177: Line 12 isn't supposed to be indented like that. I'm sure you didn't even notice, but still, it's the principle of the thing.
p. 201: There's a really bad break in Line 9. Oh, you'll see.
p. 216-217: This part, starting with Paragraph 3, is really going to be a lot funnier in the published book.
p. 218: If you think the third sentence in the fourth paragraph ought to be in quotes, I have to agree.
p. 225, last line: You'd think I was retarded.
p. 226, Line 7: Or blind.
p. 227: Pretend Nathanael West's first name is spelled correctly here. Thanks.
p. 242: There's a word in Line 12 that looks as if I typed it with a goddamn stick held in my teeth.
p. 243: I know that "uncharacteristically" in that second paragraph is spelled correctly, but I swear to God, the more I stare at it, the weirder it looks. It really doesn't sound like it should have as many letters as it does. I don't know about you, but it's starting to bother me.
p. 246: There should be a capital "L" in "Dom DeLuise."
p. 246: Yes, Dom DeLuise. He's in my book. Shut up.
p. 279: Line 3 should be "Sometimes," not "S�ø metimes," but I bet you knew that.
p. 291: Please substitute "Cumberland Avenue" for "Golf Road," even though in real life they are nowhere near each other and not in the least bit interchangeable.
p. 301: I may cut the word "fucking" in Line 3, so any offense taken here is provisional and must be checked against the bound book.
Posted by Wendy | Mon 12.06.04 11:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link
Ten Ways In Which Writing This Damn Book Was Just Like Having a Baby:
It took months and months to produce.
People kept asking me when it was due.
It gave me a taste for foods I’d never really cared about before, like clementines and buffalo wings.
It made me gain a distressing amount of weight.
It filled me with a feeling of flutteringly happy anticipation which only occasionally mingled with a sense of sheer, keening terror.
It made me inexplicably cry at things on the radio.
It made me miss work, and more of it than I'd planned on missing.
It screwed up my sleep patterns.
And my social life.
And all sense of normal existence.
Ten Ways In Which Writing This Damn Book Was Nothing At All Like Having a Baby:
Did not have to push book out of body.
Did not need to have book surgically removed from body.
Did not, and it bears repeating, have a physical entity of any kind pass through any sort of portal in my body, by which I mean neither a pre-existing opening nor one specially created for the occasion.
Book makes noise only when dropped, and then still works okay afterwards.
Book not even in the remotest danger of being abducted by a religious cult or carried off by dingoes.
Book did not wind up five pages shorter for every cigarette I smoked.
Book will not, in a few short years' time, develop the ability to dance ballet just the way I'm sure I would have had I only been given the proper encouragment and a pretty pretty tutu, alas.
Book does not have that sweet baby smell.
Book, on the other hand, will not vomit on me, or anything else.
Book will not pee itself, anywhere, ever, and especially not spectactularly into the air.
Posted by Wendy | Wed 09.08.04 01:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | send link