So my friend… I’ll call her the ‘Other Tart’ made a list yesterday about ways a person might know she was a writer. It’s a very good, giggle-worthy list, and her readers added some great ones. Go look, if you don’t believe me (or even if you do).
It got me thinking (oh, no—not time to say ‘uh oh’, yet. It wasn’t a dangerous thought)… Thinking about the person who eaves drops not for gossip, but for character quirks, the person jotting notes on a napkin because that brain of hers never stops working, that person who can’t WAIT for everyone to just LEAVE already so she can be ALONE because then she can WRITE!
I took my son to Water Polo last night—it is through the local Rec&Ed, not the US team, unfortunately, and is at the high school on the farthest side of town… Oh, I know, Ann Arbor isn’t so big, but it’s about a twenty minute drive, so to drop him off and go home, just to turn back around to pick him up would be silly… I stay.
There was a dad with a laptop… I suppose he might have been writing. There was a dad pacing, doing everything he could not to dive in there and correct the nice high school kid who is teaching these middle-schoolers. And there were moms… reading… all of them except the insane one with a pile of notes and papers she kept thumbing through… the one who made her list of suspects and made sure each one had a lie they would tell over the course of the book (thanks for that tip, Elizabeth!), and then wrote madly for an hour, and didn’t even NOTICE it was going over until a different mom said, ‘weren’t they supposed to end fifteen minutes ago?’
[gratuitous EXTRA water polo player shot]
I’d been so thoroughly in my world that the lot of them had ceased to exist. Good thing nobody needed saving.
I’m not sure I used to be able to so completely lose myself when there was so much going on. I think this is a new skill… probably not one that’s going to be good for my social life.
Ah well. The first draft of the first cozy chapter is written (sticking to the chapter every 5 days plan, though I definitely need to do finish my Roanoke research to fill in some holes… and I keep thinking of things I forgot to include… should probably fill them in, then tighten, then decide what can be moved until later, as they will probably frown on a 30-page first chapters *cough* In other words, I will have my editing job cut out for me
… but the STORY is flowing… I suppose that is the important point.
Have any of you picked up and quirks or ticks since you committed to writing, or am I slowly going insane all by myself?