Weather: rainy

Reading: Ghost Country, Sarah Paretsky

Listening to in the car: Ladder of Years, Ann Tyler

I have been pretending to rewrite Joshing the Baby. I have started but am not making a lot of progress. I wrote it in 1999. It's a pretty good story, but some work needs to be done on it. I started it before with giving some background, explaining too much, and thought that I didn't want to do that this time. But now there is too much about the cop in the beginnning. Everyone will know that he'll be the hero, I suppose, as soon as we meet him, but she needs to be the main character since it's a women's story. She is not a strong character the way I wrote her before. I believe it's because every heroine is me and I take me for granted.

I mean that I am used to me, and I know me, and I am writing for me so I don't need to explain me. That's not so, because other people will read this, have read this. I don't know what to do to make this woman more interesting, am playing with several ideas. As it stands, she had quit a job to have a baby, and is giving birth in the first chapter. THat's interesting, giving birth, and I did it pretty well, though too sequentially. I had her act like a woman giving birth, how they really act, how they feel, emotions all over the place and every personality part exaggerated. She has no major interest in the original version, though, outside of her job, which is now gone, and her child and her ex. This is natural for a nurturer, but I want her to have some other stuff to make her not your generic romance heroine. I don't even like her name any more. I think I'll give her a couple of ferrets with names from... something. A favorite author maybe. Or name them after authors? Tolkien's overdone in the real ferret-naming community. hmmmm.... My ferrets have good names, but I remember some of the ones I almost named them and maybe could use some of those. Darn it, I haven't played with them yet this morning and it's time to get ready for work. Crap. I could call them Asimov and Bradbury. I like that.

"Kimberly" (said heroine) is bold about saying what she wants, in spite of it scaring her. Some things scare her too much to talk about, and the hero's the same way. He does it by talking to the baby. When I first started this story I wanted her do the same thing, but it didn't happen. Maybe I need to go back to that. You know, she could do that, starting gradually as she picks it up from him. I am in charge of my characters. They need to do what I want them to do, dammit, and all of my heroines get so damned unruly. All of them.

I guess that's because they're me.