Felicity Banks

One-Fifth(ish)

September 6, 2013 at 11:46 pm (Daily Awesomeness)

Louisette with a friend’s baby.

I’m just under what I estimate to be one-fifth of the novel’s length. A comment CJ made about the Avatar: Airbender movie (which I can paraphrase as, “Aaaaaarrrgh!” but it was actually a clever critique on character building) made me realise how I can make my writing so much, much better. Is this it? Is this the secret book-writing macguffin I had in the attic the whole time?

Doubtful. But also a little bit possible. So maybe this book isn’t absolutely definitely destined for long and grinding failure. (Sidebar: Publisher B – who I guarantee you will have heard of – basically told me outright that they’d take another few years to bother reading my young adult steampunk novel. Thanks guys!)

Yesterday and today I spent most of my day home alone – a rare and wonderful thing – due to deciding I was too depressed (from the Mirena) to be up to scratch when dealing with children. I’m not sure I’ll go in to work at all next week.

The writing went pretty well today. My body gets painful if I sit in a chair for more than about half an hour (half an hour in a chair = 24 hours of mild pain), and my concentration is largely shot (even without Louisette in the house, I was listening out for the wake-up cry from the next room). It’s a different writing experience to my manic marathons pre-motherhood. I still wrote several thousand words, which is still a lot – and I don’t even think they suck, which is pretty surprising.

It’s hard to tell what my life is actually like, because I’m definitely not seeing straight reality-wise (it’s a depression thing). I’ve even had a couple of reality-gap moments, when I confused myself with Louisette (I was changing her the other day, and felt really good about how fit my belly looked – then realised it was her belly that looked good. Stuff like that).

Hmm…having written this, I don’t think I’ll be going to work until the Mirena is gone. I just hope the specialist is actually able to remove it, or it could be many more weeks.