One year ago, I started writing daily on my book. I heard about National Novel Writing Month, and even though I knew that there was no way I’d make it to 50,000 words in a month, even if I wasn’t starting a week late, I decided “Why not?” I had done enough work reimagining the book at this point. Now I needed to dive in and write it. Of course, I had already written it. I had two complete drafts, written over three years, plus another draft half-way through that I wrote while I was pregnant with Elan. But this material was old. It had been sitting on the virtual shelf for six years, getting dusty. I wrote it when I was a different person, before the intense love and sleeplessness of motherhood changed me, before I was far enough removed from my MFA program to no longer care whether the book would be “literary” enough, before I had decided to break that same material into three books and – gulp – write a series. There were things in the old draft I liked, but it was also full of flaws that ... more