Ten Ways In Which Writing This Book Was Just Like Having a Baby

Ten Ways In Which Writing This Damn Book Was Just Like Having a Baby:

It took months and months to produce.

People kept asking me when it was due.

It gave me a taste for foods I’d never really cared about before, like clementines and buffalo wings.

It made me gain a distressing amount of weight.

It filled me with a feeling of flutteringly happy anticipation which only occasionally mingled with a sense of sheer, keening terror.

It made me inexplicably cry at things on the radio.

It made me miss work, and more of it than I’d planned on missing.

It screwed up my sleep patterns.

And my social life.

And all sense of normal existence.

Ten Ways In Which Writing This Damn Book Was Nothing At All Like Having a Baby:

Did not have to push book out of body.

Did not need to have book surgically removed from body.

Did not, and it bears repeating, have a physical entity of any kind pass through any sort of portal in my body, by which I mean neither a pre-existing opening nor one specially created for the occasion.

Book makes noise only when dropped, and then still works okay afterwards.

Book not even in the remotest danger of being abducted by a religious cult or carried off by dingoes.

Book did not wind up five pages shorter for every cigarette I smoked.

Book will not, in a few short years’ time, develop the ability to dance ballet just the way I’m sure I would have had I only been given the proper encouragment and a pretty pretty tutu, alas.

Book does not have that sweet baby smell.

Book, on the other hand, will not vomit on me, or anything else.

Book will not pee itself, anywhere, ever, and especially not spectactularly into the air.