I am up in the middle of the night tonight, revising my novel–the one that I’ve been working on for a year, and which got done, and then, like so many of them do, somehow came undone. It’s a little like a sweater that someone pulled one stitch out of: I went to fix some plot thing in the middle of the book and suddenly found my characters facing whole new turns of events in their lives.

STOP! I said to them. GO BACK TO WHERE YOU WERE!

But you know how characters are. They are stubborn, and once you start fooling around with their plots, or yoyu’ve lost a row of their stitches, then they want to do all sorts of other things that you hadn’t planned on for them.

After trying to reason with them during many, many daylight hours and finding them uncooperative, I have decided once again to take them on in the middle of the night, when there is no email, no telephone, no panting dog, no mail delivery, no hysterical Weather Channel trumpeting that we are going to have IMMINENT THUNDERSTORMS–GO HIDE UNDER YOUR BED, PEOPLE WILL BE DYING! IT IS GOING TO BE THE WORST WEATHER YOU EVER EXPERIENCED IN YOUR LIFE! RUN QUICK!

Let me just say that I love the house in the middle of the night. Except for one thing.

There are, as I write, about 567,000 June bugs loose in here. They are bugs that, as my husband says, are ridiculous examples of the insect world. They look like evolution gone wrong, with their big heavy bodies being lugged around by these tiny little wings, while they crash into everything.

The whole room is filled with the clicking sounds of dive-bombing, misguided June bugs. Every so often one flies directly into my face. And just now one was walking on my neck. WALKING ON MY VERY NECK.  

A lot of people would see this as a reason to go get in bed and pull the covers up. But I will not be dissuaded.