Having my Baby

It has occurred to me that writing is just another form of creating a baby.

Every time we write something new, we have sired another baby or child.  True to actual life, a lot these children are created and then abandoned.

An idea, a child, is created and then because the creator, the writer, has created more than he or she can deal with, the fetus is aborted.

We write half a page, half a chapter, half a book and then because we haven't planned properly or prepared ourselves properly, we are not fit to be the parents of what we have created.  We lament that the child is not doing well.  The child is not what we had hoped for but that is not his or her fault. (is the gender of an unborn article male of female?)
 
The fault lies in our inability to be master creators.  We would like to be gods in the world of writing but alas, most of us are not
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If, by some quirk of fate we are actually able to create a story or a book in its entirety, we are then left with the responsibility of raising our creation.

 But as in human children, we need help.  Someone has to clean up the poop.  By "clean up the poop" I mean the story needs to be edited and proofed.  Editing and proofing is like picking up the poop in your back yard.  No matter hard hard I try I always miss a pile and it's the same way with writing.

When we write we know what we mean to say and it is easy to leave out words or use the wrong word in the wrong places and when we reread what we wrote our eyes see what we think is there
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Have you seen the email that goes around where all the words are misspelled?  It is very easy to read what is written and that is what we do with our own gibberish.

It is wise if you can beg or pay someone else to do the poop picking.

Once the poop is taken care, hopefully our child will move from grade school to high school where editors and agents may be lurking to grab the little bugger and make sure he or she (there's that gender thing again) stays on the straight and narrow.

If, and that is one big frigging if, (I have a love-hate relationship with the word frigging) it makes it with an agent and then a publisher, it may graduate from college and go on to bigger and better things.

Bigger and better things...like making money to support us in our old age.