When I was pregnant with Hannah, I went to a birthday party where I loaded up at the buffet and washed it all down with a big ol’ glass of OJ. Which I promptly barfed up; I’ve had an aversion to OJ ever since. That’s pretty much how I have felt about LNR the last couple of days. I tried to go through the first part to just mark the places that need work, but even that was like inspecting all of your dog’s poop, looking for the wedding ring he swallowed: it is necessary, but you *really* don’t want to.

The writing seemed too dry or dull or something; I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I was very dissatisfied. I still think the premise of the story is good, but my execution of it leaves something to be desired. I’m afraid I’ve carried over my special brand of perfectionism from sewing. I’ve been known to undo half a cross-stitch, or unravel an entire baby sweater *twice*, to fix a mistake. The problem with writing is that there is no pattern to show you where you made your mistakes.

I used to think of writing as putting together a giant puzzle with no box, but also without all the pieces you need, and some pieces you don’t need. The writer’s job would be to sort out the useless pieces, find the missing pieces, and put it all together properly.

But that’s not quite it, either. It’s more like knitting a sweater that you make up as you go along. You have taken your measurements, chosen a color, bought some yarn, and you’re off. You knit and knit and knit, and one day you have a finished cardigan that you are very proud of. But then you look it over carefully and discover that you messed up the stitch pattern halfway through, and now the top and bottom halves don’t match. One sleeve is slightly, but noticeably, longer than the other, and you forgot to put in button-holes. And the color looks truly awful in cardigan-form. You are no longer quite so pleased with the mess on your hands. You could try to pawn it off on someone, but that would be just too embarrassing for you. So you hide it in a drawer until thinking about it no longer makes you want to weep and pull out your hair. When that day comes, you pull it back out and start methodically noting where it went wrong and what you need to do to fix it, even if that means ripping the whole thing apart and starting over. This will of course require a lot of work since you didn’t use a pattern, but when you are done you will have created a truly one-of-a-kind sweater.

That’s what keeps me coming back to writing, even when I want to run screaming in the other direction from my stories.