The Gorgeous Ladies of WRESTLING. Not us. We Write.

I’m a Gorgeous Lady Of Writing.

I GLOW.

There are three other Gorgeous Ladies, and thank god there are, because we all four occupy this space where we’re still home with young kids but trying to write and edit and parent and figure out how to make money and somehow raise relatively sane children while remaining relatively sane ourselves.

A year ago we started a check-in system, whereby we touch base every other week as a means of keeping ourselves on track, getting feedback on ideas, and kvetching with people who get why we’re kvetching.

The biggest benefit for me? They get it.

They get why I want to figure this out, this strange, low-paying, high-stress, ego-smashing, challenging and crushing and fun and miserable writing thing.

They get that I can love writing and NOT be a poet and NOT be a novelist or a screenwriter or an academic.

They get what it’s like to be in the middle of a project and have your child scream MOMMY I JUST PEED ON THE FLOOR, and to be the half of a marriage not earning the big money but still trying to keep a finger in the professional pie.

They understand obsessing over a single word, and the need, sometimes, to PUT THE PEN DOWN. MOVE AWAY FROM THE PEN.

This blog, for me, is a writing project; something to work the fingertips and whatever part of my jumbled brain gets me writing. That’s it. And the GLOWs understand that. They don’t treat the blog as a little housewifey project I do because I don’t do “real work”; they treat it as writing.

Last week Rebecca and Jane and I decided to take it up a notch. (The fourth of us, Tammy from FoodontheFood, is writing a cookbook on deadline and probably wants to take it down a billion notches.) We agreed on a writing contract: Two months, writing four times a week, without checking e-mail, Twitter (gasp), or Facebook (gaspgaspACK).

I wrote a blog post during my first session. Wahoo! But my second sessions sucked. Ass. Big Ass. Sucking.

I tried to write about Brave, and how I am not brave, and about people who live in a grey space that’s not one thing or the other. But I got nowhere.

Then I started babbling about dressing up as the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland for a high school costume party. Which got me zero dates in high school and about the same number of prose words now.

Finally, I wrote this.