My thirteen-year-old narrator is especially dramatic, so maybe I’m channeling her lately. Or maybe her voice comes so naturally to me because I’m overdramatic myself. Drama abounded last night and I woke up numb and drained, made better only by the divine mochas at my new morning café, and then writing a scene about crossing an ugly bridge with my narrator in a sulk. I guess I’m getting out my feelings of being trapped through her. I’m not projecting: she does feel trapped in this car, crossing this bridge, with this person she does not want to be near, but so do I!

Is this like method acting? Do I have to work myself up into a frenzy to get a believable frenzy down on the page? I sure hope not. If so, I might not survive the writing of the book.

In other news, I owe about twenty emails. I have promised to read three stories sent to me for feedback and haven’t yet. One email I have wanted to write is to a friend of mine who’s writing a novel and by the time I finish this email he may have already finished the novel, so what help am I?

My character would let out a huge, angst-filled sigh right about now. Hey, wait, that’s me. You know it’s a bad sign when you walk down the hall and you hear an annoying, self-pitying sigh of discontent and you look around and realize, Oops, that was me. I’m the annoying discontented person in the hallway! Oh the humanity.

By the way, E thinks we should turn off the cable so I have less to distract myself with at night and have a better chance of getting either (a) more writing done or (b) more sleep. I just know everyone here is going to agree with him.

Sigh.