I am enormously, painfully pregnant with my current book. It’s the eighth month, and wherever I go, it comes with me. It’s due in less than a month, and this is the stage when I’m swimming deep in the midnight waters of the book, trying to identify the last beautiful fish, the waving fronds of that particular yellow plant over there. There is a water roar in my ears, so of course I can’t hear anything you say to me, and all my words are spent on the book, so when it comes time to talk to humans, I have a very bad case of aphasia. My hair has grown out to the middle of my back. I haven’t returned emails or letters or phone calls for a month or so now. My mother wants me to come visit—just for the afternoon—but she’s been here with me before, so she knows it’s probably not going to happen until I’m finished.

There is always something quietly crazed about this stretch. I’m as broody and prowling as any pregnant creature, and as I made my usual apologies to my partner, the (luckily) unflappable Christopher Robin, last week, he said, “I know how it is. I’ve written books before, you know.”

At first, because I am somewhat real-life challenged at the moment, I thought he was being dryly English, as he is wont to do. Then he mimed taking out a notepad and repeated all my end of the book declarations back to me: “It’s a piece of crap.” “I am brilliant!” “I want a job a Starbucks. Really this is just too hard.” “I cried all day as I wrote.” “I’m going to study dog massage.” “It’s freaking beautiful.”

Only I use much stronger language.

This is a period of extremely hard work. It feels like weaving, as if I am smoothing and combing—underwater–taking one turquoise thread in my fingers and following through chapter and scene and off-screen to make sure it plays its part throughout the tale, then holding up the entire weaving of turquoise and yellow and pink and black to make sure it actually makes a picture. It means identifying the lost threads and yanking out the parts that don’t work, then fixing the holes left behind.

I’m using the color metaphor deliberately, because I have color coding all through my notes and drafts. For this book, I have kept a scene-by-scene grid, color-coded with each character viewpoint, because it’s a complicated storyline and it made it easier for me to keep it straight. Each scene box has the character’s name written in color at the top so I can see at a glance where I am, and it provides a place to make notes about things that need fixing in that scene. Helpful system.

The final month of the book means sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to go write something—often a single paragraph or a note on one scene—that surfaced when my mind was quiet and dreaming. It means I work twelve hours a day for three days in a row, and the fourth I wake up and can’t move or speak and refill the well by watching endless reruns of American’s Next Top Model (really) or Brothers and Sisters or whatever other series I can find on cable. I crave odd foods—eggs or snap peas or a particular type of English cheddar that’s stupidly expensive and probably doesn’t really taste that much better than a good sharp Vermont variety. Still, one appeases pregnancy, so I buy it.

This last stretch means I’m not much good in public. It’s hard to remember what this world cares about—who is the President? Where are we at war? What is your name again, eldest child? I talk over dinner about the book people as if they are my friends, because at the moment, they are. On Sunday, there was a group booksigning, a fundraiser for a library, and it completely demolished me to talk for two hours, so much so that Monday, I had no words at all. Not for my book or my partner or my dogs or a phone call or a letter. Nada.

It was Monday, a work day, and the book is due in 28 days, but I’ve learned that a rest day is better for the work in the long run than propping myself up like a mannequin with plastic hands on the keys.

Instead of writing, I moved out of my head and into my body. I took the dogs for a long walk and cleaned the house. Flung open the windows to the sunshine and the spring breeze. Hung bedding out on the line, washed the panels of my kitchen greenhouse window inside and out—a challenge to reach–and I was very pleased with myself for figuring out that my mop would work. I repotted an orchid, which meant braving the toolshed for the right potting soil, and there I encountered—eek!—a shiny black widow spider who’d spun a cottony web on the bag. We both scurried away, hearts pounding, to no doubt freak each other out another day. I made sourdough starter to test some more recipes in the book and reconnected with the hippie child in me who baked bread and won prizes as a young mother. Dinner was simple, nourishing, and then I headed out to a dance class, came home and collapsed with a glass of wine to watch Medium and scare myself half to death.

This morning, I have words again. The book is very nearly finished and I know that a month from now, I’ll be sad and lonely, missing my friends in the book world. It won’t be finished, of course. There will be revisions and edits and all those things, but it will never belong to me like this again, still malleable, still entirely, selfishly, beautifully mine.

So, if you will excuse me, I have some work to do. The book world is calling me.

Are you antisocial at the end of a book? If you have a sane way of finishing without being a grouch, share your tips and secrets with the rest of us. If you have a family around, how do manage school obligations and other parental duties?

Weaving photo by Pandiyan.  Kitty photo by Jsome1.