I’ve heard that sometimes mothers take a little while to fall in love with their babies. This didn’t happen to me. It was pretty much instantaneous. They mewled and opened up their blurry eyes and I smelled their baby smell which is almost as good as puppy feet, and that was it.
My first book was like that too. I made a joke at the dinner table, which of course only I really laughed at, and Feltus Ovalton was born, followed shortly by the PoodleRats. Great Aunt Eunida was a while in coming but when she finally did show up, I fell for her smelly, eccentric personage like a ton of bricks. I wrote two sequels in a sort of romantic frenzy and neither of them amounted to much. I guess they were summer flings or one-night stands— before coming up with what is now the second book in manuscript form. I noticed when I was working on it- Feltus Ovalton and the Lost Warrior- that there was more work involved and less of those head-spinning, exhilarating moments when you feel like you’re on a roller coaster with a boy you really like (and fifteen years old too!) But this might just be because I am an older and more sober writer now with a published book under my arm and no time for this foolish dalliances. I sure hope not. I’m not that old and I’m not that sober, but I do know something about how things work in the real world and that’s enough to take the heart out of anyone.
I am just getting to the crush stage on my WIP. I can feel all those emotions swirling around. Excitement, a little anxiety, a toe-curling anticipation of something delightful just around the corner, and I am more than half in love with my main characters- Lucky and Aidan, and my secondary ones too- Grammalie Rose and Del and Leo, and the world I am building is one I would want to visit on a second or third date.
Writing is work. I have to remind myself of that but so is making a relationship that lasts. And what’s that good advice? You get out of it, what you put in.
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