After last week’s melancholy confession, I’m on the rebound, and I guess my pregnancy hormones are much to blame. But what contributed most to my change of mood is that 2 nice fellow ‘fessers agreed to review my text, so that I’ll have a more objective opinion on my latest short story. I thank them so much in advance!

Between medical checkups, nanny negotiations and online shopping for a double stroller, I picked myself up and reviewed the short story. Then I set down in front of the computer and started to type a lot of longhand bits of stories that had accumulated at the bottom of the drawer. I love writing longhand while doing something else (lunch pause, commute, stroll in the park…), but strangely enough, as much as I love beautiful stationery, I always scribble on torn pieces, recycled papers etc. This makes a lot of mess, and I’m eager to cut back on the clutter before Baby Smithereens arrives. Whenever I manage to type this mess, my imagination feels suddenly flushed with fresh ideas and I end up writing a lot of new sentences that add up with the scribbles. This makes many more unfinished short stories but I get the comforting feelings to have actually pages of my own writing and not mere pieces of (often unreadable) paper. I have some such pieces left in the drawer to continue next week.

Also, I got back to a project that I had started in 2005. It’s more than 20,000 words long, but it’s a complete mess in terms of structure, so I’ll have to get rid of many scenes and start over. But there are characters, and a plot, and I think it will be fun to develop it. When I’d started this 3 years ago, I got derailed by research (the setting is British countryside around 1850, I ended up reading everything about 19C history at our library, reread the Brontes and discovered Gaskell – not all was lost indeed!), but I also fell in the trap of wanting to plan everything ahead. I guess it’s too heavy to try to do so at the very beginning of a project, may it be short or long. And it deprives you of a lot of fun while writing it down. This time around, I have a general idea of where I want to end up but not in details. I want to leave myself some surprise on the way. Now, I’m not very confident I can successfully complete this project with the baby, but at least it will be fun. No experimental or avant-garde writing, just plain story-telling.

Personal update: Baby Smithereens is really due in a few days now, but he doesn’t seem so eager to go out and explore the world. If he doesn’t change his mind soon, we might need to convince him a little harder. I’m trying to enjoy these last few quiet days as much as possible, but I’m really looking forward to meet him and be done with the huge belly’ little nuisances!