Adjustment is Inevitable

It’s true that you lose a considerable amount of perspective when you’re pinned down in the foxhole of daily parenting. The days blur together and the nights are tension-filled vigils while you wait for the dreaded middle of the night cry.
Our two year old has been waking up with regularity between one and two A.M. which has interrupted my sleep schedule and deprived me of restful sleep. Compounding the sleep loss is his morning wake up time of five am (my wife bore the brunt of that).
Over the last week, we have changed strategies and fully adopted co-sleeping. Now, bedtime has slipped to a very fluid eightish o’clock, and there’s been some frustration around bedtime, but the middle of the night wake up has vanished, and most mornings are starting after six. For the first time in months my wife and I are sleeping for at least seven hours in a row on a regular basis. I hope it lasts, because it’s a fantastic feeling.
There are certainly personal space and privacy issues to contend with when you start co-sleeping. Losing the ability to retreat to your bedroom for romance or to just read quietly is frustrating, but I have to remember that I have the energy to complain because I’m well-rested.

Moving forward

Well that pitch is terrible. I will put a better one up shortly.
The good news is that I’ve decided that only the first few paragraphs of chapter one needs to be rewritten instead of the whole chapter. I’ve moved on in the editing process and I’ll do the rewrite at some point. I have even cut sections out completely, despite my fear that if I prune too aggrssively, there won’t be any story left at all.

I don’t have an Elevator Pitch…

And that is a problem, supposedly. Ignoring the unpalatable idea of shilling my book to every person I meet, there still is an actual need for a brief summary of the book that I can use to describe it to people.  So, I could try this:

Gwendolyn Sees Stars is about chosing to fight when you can’t win.  The main character, Charlie, is detached from his life, and he feels the people around him slipping away. He sleepwalks through his job as a social worker helping street kids, until a girl named Gwendolyn wakes him up. She’s about to become an adult by legal standards, and when she does Charlie will lose her to the adult world of jail, drugs and death. So, he decides to throw aside all of the ethical and legal restrictions and try to save her from herself, even if he loses everything in the process.