I’m having another baby.
Well, not literally.
But literally.
A word baby.
Its been at least three years gestation, in my brain-ovaries. My imagination gestation station. And now its nearly at the stage I’m going to have to let someone else read it.
Its petrifying. I’m really scared. Again.
I feel like I’m going into labour for the first time, excited and loved up but scared of whether I can give birth to the parent I want to be, let alone force a child (or two) out of my intimate bits previously only wielded in pleasure and about to be the source of a universe of pain.
Am I the writer I hope I am? I feel like an elephant, full of enormous word poos. Or could I produce a one ton miracle of wrinkley skin and miraculously long nose/incubation?
It’s like starting a new job. Will anyone like me or will they all know I’m a fraud from the way I sharpen my pencil?
But it’s worse. The only way to train for this job is to write shit and therefore what I have probably written is shit.
It’s like telling someone you love them. Via a huge loudspeaker in front of the world who is laughing at you already.
The real thing it’s like is this.
Everyone loves a baby you birth by whatever method gets the bloody thing out fast enough to have a gin soaked blue cheese fiesta. Everyone who sees your baby says - Wow you’re amazing! This is the most beautiful baby ever born! You are so clever! You lap it up but all you really did was have a few drinks, forget your pill, disengage your logical brain for a few seconds of mindblowing bliss and lie around eating, sober enough for nine months while body and nature do the rest.
But the midwife is not the editor. The editor is actually the midwife from hell. He or she-beast (they range fierce ugly in my minds eye) can take one look at the product of all your hard word working - painstaking word mongering world building torture confused blind driven motivation fueled manuscript of seventy five thousand pieces of loneliness blood and tears - and calmly pronounce:
‘That is the ugliest fucking baby ever.'
‘Rejected’.
Word poo after all.
Welcome to the world, baby book.
Now, I slay you with my red pen rejection letter.
Hope you are more resilient than a milk tanker, stronger than a hurricane, fiercer than a shoe, cause you're about to be set on the world. Welcome to the outside of my head, little one.