The beauty of the ThighMaster, if Suzanne Somers is to be believed (and I’ve no reason to doubt her), is that you can squeeze, squeeze your way to shapely hips and thighs (and stop going to aerobics classes.) Bonus feature? You can multitask! Master your thighs while you watch television, read a book, or, play shuffleboard, probably. I don’t know. I assume if I tried it, I’d manage to harm myself on the ThighMaster the same way I harm myself on nearly every other piece of exercise equipment known to man. Maybe I’d pinch large chunks of my tender thigh flesh in the hinge, or pull out my leg hair, or launch the thing into my crotch.

Just like on the treadmill.

All things being equal, I have a week’s worth of work left on the zero/first draft. I neared despondency this week, trudging like a kid pulling his sled up the hill for the third or fourth time. Writing these last few weeks felt tedious, and I carried on knowing that on the next few passes, as I remove all the bad stuff and weave in good things, there’d be a lot of removal and weaving to do.

Today, though, was a good writing day, if not a great one. Not only was I getting plot down, but I was writing well – and on a fairly major scene, too.

I would have kept going if it hadn’t been for those darn kids…by which I mean my own. In an effort to be a good, supportive parent who climbs out of her rabbit hole every once in a while, just as the going was getting good, I had to go volunteer for an activity with one of the children. My mojo was displeased that the kids Scooby-Dooed me. (Spell check is giving me some real stink eye about that term.)

But that’s what life has been for the last five years I’ve been writing, getting better while doing other things. Squeezing, squeezing my way to better word assemblage while raising kids and living life and playing shuffleboard, probably.  And while there are days where it feels like tender pieces of my flesh are being pinched – metaphorically and, depending on how much cake I eat, literally – my writing is, some days, much more shapely, like Suzanne Somers.

And other days, it still jiggles. Also like Suzanne Somers.