Late Nights

I've got a nine-week-old baby. Only nine weeks, and he pretty much insists on being held every minute of every day. There is a little tiny window from about ten to one every night when I can sleep without him in my arms. And what am I doing?

Sitting up. Blogging. Preparing a birthday gift for my seven-year-old. Listening to Lullaby by Colors on repeat. Soothing, mellow, sentimental in a way that will make anything I write drip with emotion.  .

In the next week or so, this time will transition back to writing time. Time to get back on the horse. 

I miss it. And my characters are talking in my head again. Trying to spill out through my fingers.

Tessa doesn't want to have that abortion. She's terrified of the woman with the pudgy grandmother fingers who's filling out her paperwork. She doesn't yet know that Johnny Hollis is about to destroy her life. She's living in a fantasy world, and she loves a baby she's never seen. She only remembers Julie as her eighth grade English teacher. And soon she's going to discover, one heart-wrenching moment at a time, what it means to be a mother. What it means to really love another person so hard you'll give up anything to save them.

I can't wait to help her live that beautiful, terrible, gut-wrenching part of her life that started while I sat in a conference session on creating memorable villains.

A taste of Tessa, her opening poem:

Telling - Free Verse, Tessa Marie George, 12 weeks

This isn’t a secret you can keep.

Hold it too long, and soon you will become

The secret.

And it will keep you

Until no one can see you at all anymore.

Two words held back

Until every pause is pregnant,

Every eye contact is peril.

You shake and tremble,

The sickness caused partly by fear,

And partly by the growing secret,

Too alive to ignore.

When you finally say them,

Those two small words,

You watch with a measure of satisfaction

As terror shatters her lassitude.

Watching her feel something, anything is bliss,

Marred only by the uncertainty.

What will she do,

Now that you’ve broken her cardinal rule?

The unbreakable maxim,

Don’t be like me.