Free The Stud Book by Monica Drake Page A

beauty of Internet medical advice: options.
    Georgie had Googled health and baby answers every day of her daughter’s life so far. And as this thought crossed her mind, she reenvisioned her whole book proposal: new idea, new project. It wasso clear! It wouldn’t be the book she had set out to write ten years earlier, but it was the book that mattered now, the one that’d save her sanity. She opened a blank document and typed:
    Fifty Things You May Not Need to Worry About in Baby’s First Year (But Can If You Want To): A Hypochondriac’s Guide to Child Care
    She started a list:
        
1. Crazy newborn waking-up faces
        
2. Crossed eyes
        
3. Acts deaf
        
4. Funky breathing
        
5. Poop styles
        
6. Crying jags
        
7. Staring
        
8. Red face
        
9. Bruises
    She wasn’t a doctor. She was a mom who knew how to self-soothe, as they said in babyland.
    She wrote:
        
10. Baby:
            
a. Sleeps all the time
            
b. Sleeps when held
            
c. Sleeps when swaddled
            
d. Never sleeps
            
e. Looks half-asleep when its awake
    Her daughter wasn’t even a week old, and there she had it—ten ways to go insane. Another day or two, this book would write itself.
    She’d never leave the house again. She’d stay home, write books—cast those written spells—and coo at her baby until the baby grew into a girl who could talk. The two of them would talk together. Everything that mattered was already there in those dark rooms.
    She was still on the computer, rocking Bella on her lap and darting from one link to the next, when she came across a notice: “Lit Expedition: Ecotours of the mind.”
    It was an upcoming conference, scheduled for Portland. It was a world of major literature in her own backyard, less than two months away. It was listed as “The First Annual …”
    It couldn’t be annual if it hadn’t even happened once yet. She had an urge to grade that line like a freshman placement exam. But no, she’d let it go—that wasn’t the relationship she had with the material.
    This time, she wanted in.
    Johnny Depp was listed as keynote speaker. Johnny Depp?! Gilbert Grape. Captain Jack Sparrow. Edward Scissorhands. Donnie Brasco. The Johnny Depp who channeled Hunter S. Thompson, with his thin mustache and shaggy hair, the man whom she’d known since
21 Jump Street
, who was entirely familiar yet unreachable and surreal. That man was coming to the Oregon Convention Center to wave at a crowd and talk about environmental literature?
    Okay. So she’d leave the house after all.
    Even Vigée-Lebrun, that rococo painter, knew when to exit the castle.
    This
—this
!—was the balance Georgie sought as her book project swerved from the academic to the popular then into a list of neuroses and baby poop. The life of the mind. Bring it on. She e-mailed her name to the organizers. She typed, “Hello, I’d love to volunteer to introduce speakers for your upcoming conference.” Calm and polite.
    She hit “send.”
    And before that message disappeared, she saw her mistake: “Hell, I’d love to volunteer …”
    Ah! One dropped letter and she’d turned her voice on the page from an English major with a PhD into an enthusiastic cowboy.
    Hell yes. She’d love to volunteer!
    She put on classical music. The music was for the baby but also for her. It was Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. The music was thrilling! It was the dance of Georgie’s high hopes set to a score. The conference would be her way of stepping back into the stream of the academic conversation. She needed it.
    Please, please, please.
    The organizers got back to her mid-overture. They said they’dlove her help—they were desperate for volunteers!—but also that they wouldn’t have exact assignments until the day of the conference.
    Georgie wrote back, pecking at keys on the keyboard one letter at a time,