Time For Sharing

Let's laugh.

I'll tell you an amusing (I hope) anecdote and you tell me one. We’ll laugh together. We can play catch-up, too. Check in with what's going on. I'll start--

It's been an intense few weeks trying to get the proposal out of here on time. I missed my deadline by a week and had to ask my editor for an extension of ten days. I hate to do that even though she was very nice about it, but for me writing is my profession and if I tell someone on my "team" I am going to do something, then I try hard to do it. So, now two days after mailing the proposal, I have emerged from my bat cave slightly bleary eyed and brain dead, getting ready for a driving trip to Mexico where I hope to do the research that will make my WIP spring to life and perhaps inspire additional story ideas to be excited about (like Lisa is.)

Now for my story:

1. Picture it. Husband's boss. Smart man, ladies man. Always telling me we should write a book together. He has grand ideas and I am published. He knows a lot about writing and I MUST have connections (Right. Sure.) and can do the grunt work (that last part is me extrapolating what he said.) I pass. Then he asks the dh if he thinks I will look over a story he's written. Dh asks me, says do whatever you want, I say sure, but remember I am just a confession writer (at that point.) Boss sends home story. I do for and with it what I do for and with my cohorts work. I change this. I take out that. I rewrite most of it and scratch out the rest. It wasn't very good and though I tried to be encouraging, let's just say there was a lot of red ink on those black and white pages when I was done. I spent many hours on it, aware he was the boss, aware he had an ego roughly the size of Texas, aware I didn't want to hurt him, but also painfully honest. It's a character flaw. Why else would he want me to look at it if not for my honest opinion? And I covered it with disclaimers…

Still I'd given him some new ideas to think about and corrected some pretty silly mistakes, so I felt good. In retrospect, dh kind of smirked when I gave it to him to return to boss. Didn't think much of it at the time. Dh hands it to boss who beams, opens the folder, takes one look at it and walks out the door.

Folder later seen lurking in waste basket. As boss wasn't popular with many of the folks who worked with him, I attain cult status. Wielding my mighty red pen, I had brought the tyrant to his knees (which was never my intention.)

Boss never mentions writing to me again. Not once in six more years of Christmas parties and get togethers. My dh still giggles when he thinks of the expression on boss' face. I suspect it may be why I still get flowers for no reason umpteen years later.

Now it's your turn. Go on, you know you've done something stupid or said something wild or been annoyed with some well meaning friend who acts like your writing is on the same par as their scrap booking (all insults to scrap bookers are not intended and hereby apologized for.) I think we all have at least one writing story. At least I'm hoping we do or this is going to be one boring blog!

Go on, let's laugh!