I was sitting on the floor of my too-cluttered office, flipping through magazines in the name of “research,” when my six-year-old walked into the room.
“What are you doing, Mommy?”
“I’m just looking at magazines.”
“Oh, right, so you can try to make them better.”
My son is enormously proud of my work. Despite having never read my writing, he is staunch in his conviction that my talent is unparalleled and it’s just a matter of time before the rest of the world catches on.
I will admit I’m an ace when it comes to bedtime stories. Our nightly routine involves him providing me with two characters, typically superheroes, and me conjuring up some tale of good overcoming evil. He makes these caped crusaders as ludicrous as possible (“The bad guy is Captain Singer, who sings horribly, and the good guy is Super Fish Man, who uses fish as his powers”), and is astounded when I instantly pull together a yarn that would make Dav Pilkey weep. (For the unfamiliar, Pilkey is the author of the Captain Underpants and Dog Man series, and perhaps the only writer my son feels could rival my artistry.)
When he leaves for school in the morning, he asks what I plan to write that day. When he returns home six hours later, he expects to find a newly-completed novel on the kitchen counter —…
