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I was pregnant with Violet at the time, so it was hard going. I& #39;d taken a month off entirely in December to get through the morning sickness, and told myself I would NOT think about work in that time. So every time I opened the door on my fictional world, I immediately slammed...
... it shut. And one month is a long time in Candice Land, apparently, because I actually formed a habit of it. So when I sat down to write the book in January I couldn& #39;t open the door. My brain felt like cotton wool. All the hormones raging through my body meant I was very...
...anxious and emotional all the time and I panicked that I had lost & #39;it& #39; (whatever & #39;it& #39; is). I wondered if I would have to ride out the pregnancy with no books at all on the table. What would that mean for my career? My bank account? My brand new family? And what if the...
... fog didn& #39;t clear by the time bubs arrived? How was I going to be MORE able to write when I had a brand new child? All I& #39;d heard was how difficult it was to write with a baby on your hands. I was terrified. And maybe the terror kick started it all. Because the word count ...
... dial wasn& #39;t moving and I knew it had to, and so I just went for it. I began. I wrote the scene in the gas station. The Pump& #39;n& #39;Jump gun in the face scene. And then I scrapped it and wrote it again. And then again...
... I thought I had it perfect, so I wrote on. On and on, day after day, sweating through the end of summer and periodically lying down with sheer exhaustion as early as 9am I pushed the word count up and up. At 30,000 words I showed it to my husband and agent, two of my ...
... foremost beta readers. They were both like
It wasn& #39;t good. The feedback wasn& #39;t good. It wasn& #39;t the worst feedback I& #39;d ever had. I have the kind of agent who will shotgun your ideas right out of the sky like birds if she doesn& #39;t believe in them. KAPOW. Dead. It& #39;s very useful to have a reader like that...
... because you don& #39;t waste time trying things out that aren& #39;t going to work. But less than good is bad, for me, so I scrapped the 30,000 words.
Yes, you read that right.
Bin.
I needed to get out of my house. Out of my headspace. Out of my routine. I booked a cabin in the mountains. Yes, a fucking CABIN. In the WOODS. I went by MYSELF (I did not tell my mother I was going by myself.) It looked great online. Isolated. Self-contained. The road to get ...
... in to the place was treacherous. If I screamed, no one was going to hear me.
Everything was great until night fall.
When I remembered...
... that if I screamed, no one would fucking HEAR ME.
Never. Again.
I slept with two knives. Big ones. One under the pillow and one on the nightstand. I figured I& #39;d try throwing one and with the other one I& #39;d make with the ole stabby-stabby.
Anyway I didn& #39;t sleep at all. I just sat there in the couch staring at my own refection in the enormous windows, because it was pitch black outside and I had the fire lit (because it was shitballs freezing) so the killers in the woods could see me but I couldn& #39;t see them.
Terrific.
So instead of sleeping or making any sudden moves or breathing too loudly, I plotted instead.
And when I got home I wrote those 30,000 words again. And thirteen days before my baby due date, I finished the damn book. I wrapped it in a blanket and took a baby reveal picture with it, because it had been hard to grow just like the baby inside me had been...
It had been confusing, emotional, LOOOOOONG, unreal, joyous and painful to create. Just like a baby...
But that& #39;s exactly as far as it went in its closeness to the reality of having a baby. Because three days later (yes, thanks Violet, those three days off we& #39;re awesome. Thanks heaps) Three days later I had an actual human baby...
... and it was much much much harder. Like, insanely harder.
To birth one I wrote & #39;The End& #39; on a word doc. To birth the other I nearly kicked my husband in the face. Yeah. Not the same. Not at all.
To birth one I wrote & #39;The End& #39; on a word doc. To birth the other I nearly kicked my husband in the face. Yeah. Not the same. Not at all.
... but that& #39;s another story. 
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