The Same Old Ground

Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
Same old fears -- Roger Waters

By the time this day is over, I should be *finished* with Barton's Women. And of course, by *finished* I mean  I'm "in the time between this rewrite and the next." I stopped 18 pages short of the end yesterday, wrung out, unable to push on, right in the middle of a paragraph. There are still a couple of tweaks to make in the earlier part of the manuscript: a stronger opening paragraph, a new, short scene, already thought out, in the middle, nothing major, nothing that will take too long (fingers crossed). I might be able to edit and smooth those last 18 pages AND go back and do those fixes. And then I'll hand it over to my wife.

My wife tries not to pester, but she's curious, and every so often she'll say, "Are you finished yet?" My insistence on watching Revolution feeds her curiosity (and let me tell you, between Revolution and Breaking Bad, she is just hating on Giancarlo Esposito. She needs to watch some Bakersfield, P.D. to change her mind), and I've told her enough about the story to whet her appetite. She's been telling me lately that she knows what the story is about, but I think she's just pulling my leg. Unless she's been reading over my shoulder or breaking into my e-mails, which I doubt.

He can't be contained by the boundaries of this blog!

I've said this before, but giving my writing to my wife is harder than sending queries to agents or crit partners. My wife has not offered much in the way of deep criticism; she's said she likes it, she commented once or twice on some dark aspects of some things and gushed over something else, but she's never gone deep. I wonder if perhaps I've put up a sort of defensive posture that's kept her at a distance. It's a definite possibility.

The is a good time to hand Barton's Women over to her, aside from her curiosity and my need to be done with it (for now). The Catbird's Cross Country team is running in their conference championship tomorrow, which gives me the opportunity to be out of the house almost all day. It's much easier for me not to be around when she's reading my writing. I just can't be in the same room with her. When I gave her the full manuscript for Parallel Lives, I handed it over just before she walked out the door to spend a week with her brother and his new set of triplets.

I did put the pressure on. I told her yesterday that she'd be getting it soon. That was done partly because she's been bugging me for it, and partly because it forces me to finish. Once you tell someone you're doing something like, say, writing a book, you really have to deliver, don't you? I just hope she's still excited once she's done....

Have a great weekend, all. On Monday, I'll have Nancy S. Thompson here to talk about her brand new book, The Mistaken. See you then!