They offered me drugs when I was in labor, but now that I really need something...

I hate having a night before something big is going to happen. Couldn't we just do it now and get it over with?

Why did I become an editor? What was I thinking?

Was the sum total of human happiness hitting dangerous highs, so I figured I'd better bring it down a notch?

Horrible, horrible, horrible.

I'm going to the printer first thing tomorrow morning with my adorable little PDF file of the first issue. I'm hoping to high heaven that their rates haven't gone up since I talked to them on the phone a couple of months ago.

They're going to ask me some question I can't answer and then look at me like I'm an idiot.

Even if they can print it without my having to mortgage my next child or run down to the naval base to scare up some extra cash, it'll take so long for them to finish that the few subscribers I've managed to collect will take their ball and go home.

My print run for this first issue is going to be pathetically tiny, but we're still over budget. I have postage to worry about, and more pages than I'd expected.

What if it's actually a terrible magazine?

All the pieces that seemed so heartfelt and passionate and stirring when I first read or wrote them are just random words to me now. And the allegedly funny bits would be doleful if they weren't so bland. You'd only laugh at them to be polite.

It's all typeset and ready to go. I can't make any changes to it now. And I’m sure I forgot something. Something really important. An ad. An article. Something.

I'm going to remember what it is at three o'clock in the morning and shoot straight up in bed, shrieking, the way I used to when I got those pregnancy leg cramps.

That's assuming I bother going to bed at all tonight.

And why should I, really? I'm just going to have horrifying, panicked dreams, and then wake up with that wonderful clench my stomach does when it decides that the world just isn't treating me right.

It doesn't even count as exercise. I'd have a nice toned four-pack if all those panic-clenches counted for anything but pain.

Is it too late to start drinking?

I think I was supposed to start that when I was just a writer. It'd be kind of ridiculous now. I mean, there's something kind of sexy about the picture of me sitting there with a bottle in one hand and a pen in the other, going back and forth between the two, tearing anguished prose out of my soul with the edge of a dirty glass.

It's something else to imagine myself squinting blearily at a page between shots of tequila, bawling out to anyone or no one, "Hey! Shouldn't you punctuate outside a parenthetical even if there's a question mark at the end of the last sentence inside it?"

So: editor equals no drinking. Which is good, since I always get a migraine if I so much as smell alcohol.

I'll just skip the gateway stuff and go right for the hard drugs, then.