Wednesday? Thursday? Deadlines Have My Head Spinning

I think I was always a drama queen. I really, really, really loved playing pretend. ~Kathryn Hahn

Did you like to play pretend when you were a kid? Maybe you still do sometimes, especially if your are a grandparent with the grandkids visiting. So maybe you can pretend Thursday is Wednesday. This deadline approaching for me to be finished with my current work in progress is speeding toward me like a runaway train. Do trains run away? Well, maybe a runaway horse. Or around here it might be a runaway dog when Frankie decides to ignore me and chase off across the yard to see what the neighbors are up to.

Whatever you want to pretend is running away will work. I think right now the days on my calendar are running away as I desperately try to find thos two magic words for my new book. “The End.” I am over my projected word count already which means I’ll have to delete a lot of those words I worked so hard to write. Of course, I can always find words to delete, but before I can do that, I have to find those ending words.

Anyway, the calendar days have rushed by so that I let Wednesday zoom right past without doing my usual mid-week post. Instead I was doing some pretending as a writer and trying to get my characters to decide to play the last scene in my book. So far they are dragging their feet. They just aren’t ready to stop having problems.

Writing is such a ‘pretend’ profession. Nobody is counting on you at all. You can’t ‘pretend’ to be a lawyer or a teacher. It takes a lot of grit to continue. ~MacKenzie Scott

My upcoming book, In the Shadow of the River, which thank goodness is written, edited, and printed to soon be flying out to readers, is all about pretending. Not only because the book is set on a river showboat with a cast of actors who put on a pretend play each evening, but also because there’s a lot of pretending going on in the lives of my characters.

It was fun writing a story of pretend but as Jacci’s mother tells her, you don’t want to forget who you really are. And if you’re a writer with a deadline, you don’t want to forget what month it is while you rush out words to finally be able to write those last two words that you never really see at the end of a book. But on my computer screen, you can bet I type The End when I get to the last page of that first draft.  And until I get there I’ll keep doing some pretending with my characters.

Have you ever done some pretending as an actor or actress? Or do you just like to pretend along with those actors or with the characters in the books you love?