Challenges

As I write my book, I keep coming across reminders about just how much of my life I've spent on this--and how fast time flies. Yesterday I found vet bills from 1996 filed in with old photocopies from the Moving Picture World (1916-7), and was shocked to find Peeps was a mere 4 lbs when she was a year old cat. Now she's a robust 13.1 lbs. I'd assumed she'd reached her full size by her first birthday. Then I looked at the date for some files I was using--May 2000. I could have sworn it wasn't 8 years ago.

So finishing is going to be good. But there's the echoes of those older drafts, wasted years and paths not taken. I think this is why people write fast. And of course I keep thinking that I should have been trying to have babies then--had that happened, I would have been able to conceive with greater ease. It's the topic I go back to at all times. Let's hope finishing the book can coincide with the start of a new life. It would be a perfect coda to finish a far from perfect, if too ambitious book, with a perfect baby, all Evan's and my own. For that I work, pray and try to keep memories of a more fertile but very single state out of my head.