Man, this writing stuff is hard. Maybe I shouldn’t say that out loud when people are in the early throes of writing their novels, but it’s tough, it’s killer, it’s just takes up a lot of space in your head and then there isn’t much left of you. Oh wait. Maybe it’s not the writing that’s hard—maybe it’s everything else.

I’ve been putting everything off until after November 15, my deadline—like I’ll see friends and family and make phone calls and send emails and clean out the apartment and be here and do that, just remind me later. But I’ll still be writing after November 15, that’s not the end. There will be revisions, of course. And then there are all the other things I need to write to quote-unquote save myself and my husband or at least keep us off the Titanic.*

I’ve been working hard on this manuscript, and I want to keep up the work ethic for my next projects. So it’s not about to end at all. It’s just going to keep going, and going and going. You’d think by now I’d get used to it.

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* Just an aside about the movie Titanic: It’s all so romantic and everything’s beautiful and Kate ditches the rich jerk for Leo, the poor artist, which I would totally do too, and I want them to run away together and then, as you know, the ship starts to sink and Kate and Leo end up trying to stay afloat in the sea waiting for the rescue boats. Then—and this is what drives me crazy—they find a floating door and Kate lies down on top of it and makes absolutely no room for Leo beside her. So he just hangs on with his hands, submerged up to his shoulders in the ice-cold water. How could she do that! Of course he’s going to freeze to death and die! Every time that scene comes on, I tell E: I would not let you drown, I would have made room for you on the door. And he’s like, There’s no way, we would both sink. And I am like, There is ALWAYS a way. I would have tried, at least. I wouldn’t have just said, Oh, sure, sweetie, hang on by your pinkies while I lounge around up here watching you get hypothermia. I swear, the end of that movie makes me so incredibly angry. Leo did not have to die! The end.