The invisible eye roll

Camp was nice, but I'm really glad I'm home. The funny thing is, I missed everybody here a lot more than they missed me. It's bad enough when the boys stop needing me, but I really thought my husband would notice that my side of the bed was empty. I guess I'll stay gone longer next summer.

I took the old laptop along and tried to get some editing done on Troubled_Waters. I think I managed to get through five pages. Sitting in my bunk late at night with my headphones on, typing just wasn't as romantic as it sounded. Plus I was exhausted. I got up at dawn and went looking for a quiet spot to work and wound up at at what I thought was an isolated picnic table working with a cup of coffee and the squirrels for company. That was a little better, but it was short-lived. It seemed that most of camp thought getting up at dawn was a good idea and it turned out that my isolated picnic table was everyone else's favorite morning spot as well. So then it was "Good morning, Mary! Hey what are you doing?" I tried the noncommittal "Oh just working on something", hoping that would end the questions. It didn't. So then I tried the direct approach. "I've written a book and I'm editing it." That was greeted with the usual momentary pause and some approximation of "Oh, that's nice." Though it did serve to send them in search of some other place to drink their coffee.

Christopher Moore, the best-selling author of "Stupidest Angel" once commented that telling people you're a writer is useless (especially people from Ohio, for some reason). Most people think you're giving yourself airs because no one ever makes it as one--at least no one they've ever met.

Chris was right. I think to a lot of people, making reference to the craft of writing is a lot like slinging the back of one's hand across one's forehead and collapsing onto a divan while crying out in a prounced Southern accent, "Oh what eva will Ah do?" I never, ever, ever tell people I'm a writer, but I do sometimes make reference to writing something. And even that seems to be a mistake. It almost always results in a half-second's pause and some comment like I mentioned above.

Anyway--I'd like to report that I'm done with this draft, but I'm not. It's close, closer than I've come before, but I'm still catching and fixing mistakes. I really had every intention of being done by now. I confess I've taken off a few days here and there, but only a very few.

I'm comforted somewhat by Simon Haynes blog entry that he's nearly done with Just Desserts, but that it's still rough as I happened to know he's been working on it at least since last November. So maybe I'm not as far behind as I think I am. Of course he's got a publishing contract and an agent sooo . . . . maybe there's no comparison.

Meanwhile I'm chasing down the idea for a short story. It's all about harmonic connections. You know how when a friend calls just about the time you were thinking about them? It's about that, only better, with a lot more sentences.