1.  I think, “I have a blog!”

2.  I think, “Wow, I haven’t blogged for a while.”

3.  I think, “Gosh, I should blog, but first I’ll stare at Twitter for 45 minutes and try to remember why I follow this religious zealot who insists on tweeting his every meal.”

4.  I feel guilty about not blogging.

5.  I feel like I don’t have enough time for a “proper post”.

6.  I hate myself a little.

7.  I hate myself a lot.

8.  I blog something inane that amuses me (and probably only me) and then remember that it is FUN.

8.   Conclusion:  BLOGGING IS FUN!  I LIKE TO BLOG!

But I have no time for fun because, as the title subtly suggests, I AM VERY BUSY AND IMPORTANT.  I am.  Ask my new agent, Colleen Lindsay, of Fine Print Lit.   That’s right, I have a new agent.   Confirmation that I am both BUSY.    And… IMPORTANT!

That’s from The Rules.   In case you didn’t know.  Did you ever read The Rules?  No?  Well, neither did I because, well, of course I didn’t.   OK, fine, I did buy The Rules.   But it was remaindered and 75 cents and I bought it as a joke and I didn’t read it.   Well, I did read a bit of it.   And the gist of it was that if you act BUSY AND IMPORTANT then men will love you and somehow, I don’t know exactly how because I skipped all the middle parts, you end up living in a large house in Dallas, Texas, silently seething with resentment because your wealthy now-husband is having an affair with his secretary.   Or maybe I’m confusing two books.    Bad book mash up, FTW!

I don’t want you to think I bought The Rules thinking I would follow them and earn myself a man to make pot roast and martinis for, I DID NOT.   I bought it for someone else.   Anyway — and you’ve probably heard this story before, but I’m repeating it anyway — around the time I bought The Rules (for 75 cents!) (remaindered!), I was forced (mostly against my will) to go to Toronto.  I like Toronto just fine but I’m a horribly wimpy person who is scared of flying.   So there I am,  a person who owns The Rules (as a joke!) and who is convinced that she is going to die in a plane crash who has to go to TO.   What’s a person to do?

Obviously I became extra-afraid because if I were to die in a plane crash (inevitable) and my family was to clean out my apartment (at the time, I lived in the world’s smallest condo), what if they were to find The Rules sitting there on my bookshelf like I’d bought it intentionally?  What if they were to think that I was a person who thought that buying, reading and following The Rules was a good idea?  THEY’D BE GUTTED.  Destroyed!  It would be too depressing to get over.   There I am, dead.   And there they are, having to come to terms with the fact that I’m not only dead, but when I was alive, I was an idiot.   That wouldn’t do.

So what I did was I packed The Rules.    Then I thought, “Well, if the plane goes down, the luggage may not burn up in the ensuing fireball and my luggage may be returned to my family and (see: above)…”   So I put it in my carry on.   Then I thought, “What if I’m getting something from my carry on and the person next to me sees The Rules in my bag and immediately thinks I am the kind of person who reads The Rules?”   Then I got anxious.   So what I did was, when my seatmate was in the bathroom, I snuck the book out of my carry on and put it in the seat pocket in front of her seat so if they plane DID crash, they (whoever “they” are) would think it was HER book and I would die with my pride intact.

Except not really because there is no small amount of horrifically bad writing on my computer that when I die, someone will likely read.   The shame!  So actually, what I need is for someone to agree to delete the entire contents of my macbook (except for the pictures, of course) in the event of my sudden demise.   Sign up in the comments, please, for this urgent duty.

I leave you with this picture of The Birdy.   It has nothing to do with this post.   I just like it because it beautifully captures her mood of late, which is something like the eye-rolling haughtiness of a teenager combined with the violent rages of a toddler, plus a hefty dose of cuteness.

So I wrote that book.   (OK, OK, I HALF wrote that book and am writing the rest, I am, seriously, for real, AS WE SPEAK, except not really right now because obviously am blogging and not writing a book).   Then I wrote another one called THE KING OF BANANALAND VS. THE PORTAL OF EVIL.   And that was pretty fun, so I started writing another one called [INSERT SECRET TITLE THAT I DON'T WANT YOU TO STEAL HERE], but I shelved that one for a bit because while it was also fun, I wasn’t quite ready for it yet.   For one thing, it stars actual grown ups, and I’ve been writing about the young uns for so long that grown ups feel very intimidating with their quirky maturity and rational thoughts.   So I rewrote an old book called THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ME.   Then I wrote something else called [CAN'T TELL YOU OUT OF FEAR YOU'LL STEAL IT, TOO] [HA HA, I'M SO PARANOID], which is almost — but not quite — finished.    I’m not showing off, or I am, but only a little, I’m just saying that literally EVERY SPARE MINUTE that I have has been spent writing or procrastinating which is really a huge part of the writing process, so you have to make time for it, too.

This has come at a bit of a cost.   For example, I don’t have much time to see friends — probably I don’t have many left because I’ve really been writing to the exclusion of much else, apart from the 12-14 hours a day I spend entertaining/disciplining/chasing/yelling at/wiping up after my kids and the hour I spend watching completely brainless reality TV shows like ANTM or Amazing Race.   I don’t get my haircut.   I don’t get a manicure.   Well, that’s a bad example because I never have, but you get my drift.   I don’t go for a walk by myself or go to the gym or do other normal person stuff because on some level I feel like I have to be writing all the time until I get a new agent/another contract/a paycheque.   Why am I telling you this?  OH, COME ON, you know blogging is my substitute for therapy.   I don’t go to therapy.  I AM BUSY WRITING.

Another thing I haven’t been doing is reading.    I know, right?  Double U Tee Aitch?  (Spelling out letters amuses me!  I am easily amused!)   I used to read a minimum of four books a week.  I’m not exaggerating.   Lately, I’ve been reading only YA and MG and that feels like work because someone on my Twitter stream was yapping on about how you have to read heavily in a genre in order to be successful in it — which is rubbish because I’ve been successful in these genres for a long time without reading it much — but I felt like “Hey, I read it on Twitter, so it must be true!”  I’m sort of an idiot like that.   Anyway, for a while I read some YA and MG, usually just the first few chapters because honestly it’s not “escapism” when it is also your job and if you are me then it opens all sorts of doors for the Insecurity Fairies to fly into your brain and sprinkle their “YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE DOING” dust on every surface, leaving you in the fetal position wondering if you actually have the skillz now to get that job at MacDonald’s that you failed to get when you were fourteen.

I can honestly say that reading other people’s YA and MG does not make me a better writer.   Instead, I worry that I’m inadvertently stealing someone else’s voice and/or that I suck.  No one wants to feel that way.  And it’s making me sort of not love reading because I feel like I’m doing it because I ought to, not because I want to.

So what I did today — and on Saturdays, Mr. Spuddle takes the sprogs and deposits them on his mother’s floor where they play with a myriad of My Little Pony toys ecstatically for eight continuous hours, returning home at bedtime high on sugar and the adrenalin rush of having successfully lifted the pink poodle from Grammy’s My Little Petshop playset and managed to get it home without being caught — was NOTHING.  ( They usually take three hours to put to bed after that, but no matter, I’ve had a day “off” which I invariably spend updating my blog and Twitter and also, yes, writing writing and more writing.)

Today, I went shopping.   I had to return some jeans that were made for someone who is not shaped like a large C with a bulge in the middle, which actually is what I look like due to a lifetime of bad posture and weird protruding belly, so I exchanged them for kids’ shorts because the kids are not shaped like large Cs or even small ones, and thus deserve clothing more than I do.  Then I went to the library and spent an entire hour selecting 75? 60? some alarming number? of books for the kids and for me.   You know, picture books for them (we burn through about fifty a week), and actual adult hardcover books for myself.    Then when I came home, I felt guilty for NOT WORKING and panicked and did a bunch of work and then I realized I was getting all wound up and anxious and my shoulders were somewhere near my ears so I CLOSED THE COMPUTER.   I did.   And I watched Project Runway.   Then I made a grilled cheese sandwich.   Then I went downstairs and got a beer out of the garage — they’ve been there since last summer — because I’d sort of forgotten that I kind of like beer.   And I chose a book from my library pile (How To Talk To  Widower — Jonathan Tropper).   And I sat down and decided to just sit.   And read.   And drink my beer.

Then I knocked the beer over and it spilled all over the floor which is just Fate’s way of telling me that I’m a lazy good-for-nothing and I should be working.   So I mopped that up and then I tried again.   Then I thought, “Hey, I should blog about how I’m taking a day off from writing*.”

And I did.

The End.

* To make up for this transgression, you KNOW I’m staying up late all week to meet the word count.   But still, it’s a day for ME!   Well, not exactly for ME, but for all of us in the house who enjoy clean laundry and wearing socks.   (I bought socks for the kids.  That was the “shopping”.  I realize I made it sound more fun than it was.  But I also bought Easter stuff!) (Also for the kids.) (OK, fine, I ate some of the candy.) (Yes, I do feel sort of sick now.)

Mix a bunch of metaphors.   Rinse.   Lather.   Repeat.

Some pictures, which I’m uploading now as I take them instead of just waiting until I’ve edited them to my version of as-good-as-they-can-be, are metaphors for the start or the restart of the book of the moment, and bad metaphors at that.   Here’s the first one:  New beginning!   Get it?

And another one.   Let’s call this one FLOW:

And finally, this one.   I call it Work-In-Progress, even though that makes no sense, because it stretches this metaphor that I’ve been abusing throughout this post to the breaking point.   Snap.

OK, fine, it’s just a fish.    We were at the aquarium yesterday.   It wasn’t really a metaphor, it was just a good way to keep the kids amused and play with the camera at the same time.   Back to work, peeps.

But now! Now, my pretty people, the coffee cup is also a physical manifestation of GUILT and a reminder that I am an affront to Nanowrimo authors everywhere and am not WORTHY of the CUP OF BEAUTY (not the least reason of which is that it just took me three tries to correctly type “beauty” — there, I did it again, but the second time it took only two). The thing is that I have a really hard time writing through without stopping to edit. I’m an edit-in-progress writer. I like the beginning to be madly polished and JUST SO before I do the next bit and if I plunge forward with a sloppy beginning then my novel is all off-track and can’t find itself, like a teenager who is trying to decide who they are going to be and not quite succeeding and thus having both an enormous number of piercings and a collection of LaCoste clothing. I need to know my direction before I can go on with a volume of words just for the sake of volume, so, Nanowrimo, I’m sorry. But.

I quit.

Only I’m not even really quitting, I’m 11000 words in, and these 11000 words are polished enough that they will stay in the completed first draft but I’m also — ALSO! — actively pursuing an agent, I need a new one, as you know because I’ve mentioned it a thousand times, and am prepping manuscripts for submission and query letters and doing research on who is who and what is what and and AND — also! — I have another book I am working on and my Nano book, which I love love LOVE, WILL get done but the problem is (and here is another excuse) that I get damaged when I see my Nano “friends” and their wordcounts (some of which are awe-inspiring) and I become a puddle of insecurity and self-doubt and I wonder how they are doing this and of course, they may not have twenty children (or two) (or three) and a babysitter only for 8 hours a week plus Saturdays to do writing and I don’t know if the words they are generating are really good words or just words like a million monkeys would generate, but still, it triggers in me this thing that you all know as PROCRASTINATION. I don’t know why, but somehow seeing that PersonX has done 178,000 words already makes me switch windows over to the JCrew or Anthropologie websites (or, more likely, a real estate page) where I fantasy shop for clothes that have no relevance to my actual life or waterfront property for my fantasy lake house. Next thing I know, the day is over and I’ve produced only 200 words, which for me is a joke because when I’m just writing in my regular way and no one is measuring it, I can easily write 2000 words in an hour. Already this post (which has taken five minutes) has 587 words. It’s something about the measuring stick and people asking me for wordcounts that makes me think of when I used to diet and people would ask how many pounds I’d lost and I’d immediately — just spontaneously I think, with no food intake whatsoever — gain 10 pounds. I never diet now and I’m thin, even though it’s a fat-thin as you know if you’ve memorized every blog post I’ve ever written. It’s the lack of a measuring stick (or in this case a scale) that makes it work.

Nano is measuring me. NANO IS JUDGING ME FOR MY LACK OF WORDS. And then what happens is that instead of producing more words, I delete half of what I’ve written because some of it wasn’t properly produced, it was just words for the sake of them.

But — BUT! — I don’t think YOU should quit. No, you should not, for all the reasons I mentioned in my previous post about learning how to write a book and finding out that it’s hard. I am not NOT WRITING, I am writing madly and accumulating a lot of words in other books that I’m editing because they need it and I also need to SELL them and so my time, my precious time, is divided and I want my Nano book to be good. At the end of November, I’ll probably HAVE 50,000 words but the only way I’m going to get there, because I’m half-crazy or fully-crazy, depending on your unit of measure — is if I stop tracking words and comparing to other people and start just writing this insane 80s ghost story-romance-fantasy without looking at the wordcount to see how well I’m doing.

I’m TOTALLY going to use the coffee cup though. AUTHOR coffee tastes better than regular coffee and besides I love it when people go, “WOW, YOU’RE AN AUTHOR?” as though it is a requirement to BE the thing it says you are on your coffee cup. Maybe I’ll put PRINCESS on my next one or ROCKET SCIENTIST.

Speaking of which, I’ve been having this horrible problem with leg itch. Just my lower legs and only if I lie down. It is SO FRUSTRATING because SLEEPING involves LYING DOWN and the ITCH is so over-the-top that I lie in bed and dream about SCRAPING OFF ALL MY LEG SKIN WITH STEEL WOOL. I went to the doctor and without even so much as a sideways glance at my legs, he diagnosed me with Degenerative Disc Disease, which I have, yes, but wait, what? Itch from my back? The hell? So I spent some hours spelunking the internet and found a grand total of 0 references to itchy lower legs resulting from irritated discs. But what I did find was 10,560 references to leg itch and lymphoma, which I’m now only 7% convinced that I have and will die from. I’m 93% convinced that my problem actually has to do with the fact that I have almost no blood pressure and maybe from shaving I have folliculitis or something that is exacerbated when I’m lying down because that’s the only time my blood actually circulates that far. Someday someone may actually LOOK at my legs and diagnose them with, you know, actual information, instead of standing across the room and shouting, “YOU HAVE A BAD BACK! OBVIOUSLY YOUR LEGS ITCH!” Because, after all, not entirely obvious, is it?

Anywho, who cares? I do, but only when I’m lying down. The rest of the time, I don’t think that much about the itch. That’s how my brain works. If it isn’t occurring in that EXACT SECOND, I’m blissfully unaware of any potentially fatal cancers I may be harboring. Such is life.

But none of that has anything to do with NaNoWriMo, which I am doing and you should, too. Why not? Every person who has ever said, “I’m going to write a book one day when I have time!” should do it because you are never going to have time. It’s like waiting to have kids until you have time and money. When will that happen? Never. Life slips by. Your legs itch, you get older, you’re busy, the kids are shouting at you, and then BAM it’s TOO LATE. Don’t let it be too late for you! Write it! Then you will see exactly what it is like to write a book and all the GOOD PARTS of book writing as well as the sloggy, middle-of-the-book part where the plot gets away from you and the characters all fall into a blue funk and you realize that it’s all a disaster and you may as well go back to your day job, or in my case GET a day job, which is the part where many people probably just go, “Enh, screw it!” because it is hard BUT also it’s amazing if/when you get to the end and if/when it comes out the way you want it to. It’s like what I imagine running a marathon would be like if at the end of a marathon you then had something that you had to sell, which is like a whole other marathon or maybe like a triathalon, with the idea being the swimming, the writing being the bike, and the actual marathon being the whole after-work of it. What am I talking about? I am the opposite of an athlete and I’m currently wearing yoga clothes from head to toe (well, am barefoot, but you get the idea) which are making me feel like an imposter because I have taken exactly zero yoga classes in my life. Why am I outfitted for yoga? No effing idea. It’s comfortable? I like to play pretend?

I can’t stay on topic?

All those things.

As promised by the title, I wind up this post with five components of my NaNoWriMo book-to-be. Components. DO NOT STEAL THEM. I’M WATCHING YOU. Actually the funny part of this is that I never tell people anything about what I’m writing because I think that, for example, you’ll hear the word “octopus” and go, “YES! That is what MY book will be about!” And somehow, through some cosmic fluke, you will write the EXACT SAME BOOK as me and sell yours first. I only fear this because it happened to me once, after two years of research for an adult literary novel about the notorious Brother Twelve written from the perspective of one of his female partner/followers, someone else released the EXACT SAME BOOK. Even in a similar voice to mine, which made me crazy. Well, crazier.

Regardless, undaunted, I give you five components of my soon-to-be massively successful YA endeavour. I have no title yet, so you can’t steal that. But the book will have:

1. A ghost.
2. Hall and Oates.
3. Love’s Baby Soft.
4. A crow.
5. Oliver Peoples eyeglass frame names.

AND IT WILL BE FUNNY.

Write on, dudes.