I was inspired to write a novel by a book called “No Plot, No Problem” that was written by one of the people who created National Novel Writing Month. As you can see from my almost daily blather, I am not a gifted creative writer. I am able to persuade using legal reasoning, analogies and what not, but do not have that precious gift of turning a phrase, or coining it, or whatever it is. As a college friend of mine used to say “I’m an ideas man” except I am not a man, not anymore. Anyway, I have ideas for books and I am one of those people who said “someday I am going to write a book.” I read lots of books, most of them not very well written (I am a fan of crime fiction and chick lit) and there are lots of books in the world and I cannot imagine that every one of them started out that great. So, I sat down with a glimmer of an idea in my mind and wrote. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. I hand wrote stuff while on my trip and all of the things this guy writes in his book turned out to be true. The protagonist, who was almost autobiographical at the beginning of the book, well, she turned out not to be like me at all. The character based on my best friend HM, well, she isn’t really like her either. The characters started to take on a life of their own, and they ended up doing things I would not have predicted at the beginning. Some of the things I thought would be important plot points turned out to be fairly minor and in the end, I was pretty pleased with the results.

The thing clearly needs a lot of work, but I’m not ready to read it again yet. Husband is reading it now, and he’s laughed out loud a couple of times, which is a good thing. Other people who know that I’ve been working on it have asked when they can read it and I tell them, not yet, its not soup yet. I’m not afraid of the criticisms, I have a pretty thick skin and, let’s be honest here, I wrote it in thirty days. It’s not going to win any literary prizes. But, for now, I think I am just going to keep it within the confines of this street in Baltimore and give it a chance to breathe.