A friend asked me this question today....it's a good question, to which I feel I should have a good answer: a date, a deadline, a sure-fire reply with facts and figures to back me up. But I don't. If there's anything I've learned while writing my first book, it's that writing is a lot like parenting: you start out with a great idea--let's have kids!--but the ideas themselves take over pretty much within a week or two of having life--just like kids.
For me, writing a book is like peeling an onion layer by layer and finding a peach pit in the center so you have to take a look at all the layers and figure out where you went wrong. Or making a quilt, patch by patch, but the design for the quilt shifts when you're not looking. Pieces add themselves; others disappear.
Maybe it'll get easier the more books I write. Maybe.
For now, I do have a complete manuscript, but I won't call it "whole." I do have goals: get it whole, get it out to agents by year's end. And in between being a mommy and a wife and a friend and a human being who needs to sleep (apparently) and eat (probably not quite so much) and laugh (definitely), I am working.
I will finish this book. I will. I finally know where I'm going, I can feel it. But my biggest, most important goal? That my kids will not suffer for my ambition.
I've never managed to finish a book before, much less found the confidence to attend a writer's conference and actually pitch my project to agents and editors. All of the patience, the confidence, the "openness" I needed to get this far--I owe to my kids and my husband. They have taught me to stop, look and listen. To accept constructive criticism (hey, if I can be told five days out of seven that dinner looks "gross like cow farts" and still eat it with a smile on my face, I can listen to you completely pick apart my writing with a smile on my face) and most of all, to believe in myself.
My kids and my husband are my biggest fans--of me as a mom, and of me as a writer. They're not star-struck, wide-eyed easy fans--they don't always buy what I'm selling--but even when they don't like my decisions as mother, or where I'm going in a story, they hear something in what I'm saying or doing or reading that I only thought I heard myself before.
For them, my success is not even a matter of belief: it's a matter of knowing.
So, for them, I will not wear myself out so that I can't go canoeing with them, or have the energy to play Polly Pockets with my daughter or listen to my son tell me his latest ideas for his own stories. I will try to the best of my ability to put dinner on the table at least five nights a week--although that isn't exactly a strength, even without the writing interfering. I will blog more consistently when they return to school and, for the first time in eleven years I am home alone all day, and I will be able to work on the book consistently.
Until then, during then, I do the best I can.
Where am I? Still here: being a mom and a wife and a friend, laughing, writing when I can, balancing, living. I might take longer to get wherever I'm going then some, but I'll get there. I always get where I'm going.
