Thursday, October 11, 2012

Call and Response: Viewpoints in 100 Words (#12)

When our daughter was born, I moved my office paraphernalia from her room to the master bedroom. At night, the Moloch of a computer taunted me. When my husband and I made time for sex, if I wasn't distracted by the thought of our daughter waking up, I was distracted by the computer, by the fact that I should be sitting in front of it, writing every night. When I should've been thinking about sex, I thought about writing. Worse, when I did manage to write, I thought about sex. I finally reached a point where I did neither well.

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She's been distracted for years, and I've always felt that only part of her was with me. "I'm a writer," she explained. "I pay attention to everything. And at some point I'll use it. I remember women's shoes and the color of their toenails, and I notice how people move during their conversations. I can't help it. Everything's fair game." Often, I know she isn't really with me--she's using whatever we're doing for a plot line or a segment of dialog. To her, everyone and everything are pretend. I'd complain, but who wants to read that in a novel?

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