Eighteen months later...

My novel, Falling Star, is finished and ready to be sent off to agents.  It took me eighteen months to write it, whi is the same amount of time it took to create both my children.  I can't decide which was harder. 

I'm one of those women who hated pregnancy.  I did not glow.  I did not look adorable with my beach ball stomach in trendy little maternity jeans and sweaters like the women on the cover of those annoying pregnancy health magazines, which I believe are the seeds of mommy guilt.  Oh yes, ladies, they get us early with the guilt that we're not eating right, or exercising enough or denying the idea of an epidural.  But, I digress.

I had all day sickness for the first four months with both my pregnancies. I still don't understand how a person can be starving and nauseous at the same time, but that's what it was.  The only thing that sounded good to eat the first four months were those chicken strips and jo-jo potatoes from the supermarket, which I only indulged in once when my husband was gone on a boyscout weekend trip and I was alone with my all day sickness and my three year old.  I remember sitting on the living room floor next to my jo-jos and my three year old (she had mac & cheese) thinking there was no way I would get through the entire weekend without backup.  The chicken strips might have been the only thing that got me through that weekend.  Oh, and bean dip with pretzels.  I almost forgot to mention that. 

So, with the novel, I don't have fifteen pounds to lose after the birth.  And, I don't have to get up six times in the night to feed it. 

After such a long journey of intense work, I have to say I feel odd and a little lost now it's finished.  There's still a lot of work to do - writing a synopsis, coming up with a pitch, and praying someone thinks it's worthy of publication.  I wish I didn't have to spend time on all of the 'business' part of the writer life because I've already got an idea germinating for my next novel and I'm itching to get started.

Maybe the business side of all this is like getting up six times in the night with your newborn.  At the end of those twelve or sixteen weeks, you have a perfect little angel that sleeps through the night and smiles at you.

I'm hoping this baby smiles at me from the display window at Barnes and Noble.

Comments

[Katherine]

Thank you for not calling it morning sickness...whoever (or is it whomever?) named it must have been a man, or one of those annoying women on the front cover of the magazine. By the way, it is even more annoying to read those when you are on bed rest and exercise for the day means you are allowed to get up to pee. Solidarity Sister!!!