Being a caring parent doesn’t mean that you are always actively caring. You do not shovel food and praise and new clothes, advice and culture and transportation, jokes and medicine and money into your children with every waking breath. But they are never far from your thoughts. And the idea is a way of defining you. Caring parent is who you are.
For a writer, books are your children. You don’t write every minute. You take time off to go to movies and do the Spelling Bee and, well, gaze into space and think of Tom Thumb, as somebody says. But there are not too many hours in the day when you forget your current book and its problems.
The Camp FUNdament book is in rewrite. I’m considering Erin the Good’s commentary as I go over my chapters, agreeing most of the time, pushing back ever so often, and redrafting a couple of tough sections.
Remember that scene where Kyle witnesses Adele’s bathing suit malfunction and reacts with a male function? Couple changes there. I’m not grumbling. I think Erin has made the correct judgment call. It’s my job to, as it were, sell the sizzle without any hot dog. Or something.
I’m taking time off from rewriting to bring you all up to date. Or am I? I thought about the rewrite just now, making that joke.
Because that’s who I am.
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