The solution to how I would manage to edit my book lay in rolling with my baby’s punches, so to speak, not fighting her. I discovered that it was possible to type with a baby balanced across my knees. And attached to my nipple.

She nursed. I typed. Then she slept in my lap. I cut and pasted. I typed. Then I propped her in her car seat on the floor next to my chair. The car seat was the only place she would sleep without being in direct physical contact with me. She slept. I edited. Then she’d wake up and I’d put her back in my lap and start the cycle over again. There was a position shift at least every half hour, and each position shift involved a fair amount of soothing before I got back to the book. But it worked. By following her newborn rhythms, I could write and revise.

I lived and breathed the rewrite. It was late spring, and every day my husband and I would take turns: one of us would take the dog and the other of us would tie the baby into her carrier and strap her onto our chest so the four of us could go for a walk. We became a well-known sight in the neighborhood, the couple with the tiny baby bobbing along in her fabric sling and the white dog bobbing along at our side. While we walked, I thought about the book. I talked about it. Usually, my husband listened patiently, remaining silent when I thought aloud and unknotted plot tangles. One exception to this happened the day I explained that in the novel, when John helps a little boy who leaves behind a clue giving away that someone masterminded his disappearance, reporters call the unknown person the Wild Goose. My husband was the one who suggested that John would be disgusted with the nickname. I immediately knew he was right. John didn’t want a fancy code name. All he wanted was to be invisible. But if he had to have a nickname, he would have wanted something sexier than…a goose.

In a month, I had a romantic suspense novel completed, along with a now two-month-old baby who was full of milk and none the worse for wear despite all the keyboarding going on right above her head.